If (like me) you’re a relative newcomer to Arduino's integrated development environment (IDE) but not to programming, then the icons might surprise you!
The icons are targeted for beginners, but I cannot tell that the up-arrow means open, and the down-arrow means save! None of it is intuitive to me : (
However, I’m a lot more familiar with Eclipse IDE.. I wanted Eclipse style icons : ) (I appreciate that for newcomers to Eclipse, probably some of the icons there don’t make sense at all either : )
So, I set about finding a suitable Arduino dark theme to start with, and then edited it using the Eclipse icons. If you’re curious how to do this for your own designs, there is a buttons.png file that can be modified with a graphics editor, and a theme.txt file that contains colors in hexadecimal. There’s undoubtedly more to it for advanced theme creators, but that’s all I needed to know.
Anyway, in a nutshell, if you prefer Eclipse-style icons, then here’s how to do it:
First, find the theme folder on your PC (if you’ve installed Arduino via the Windows Store, this is hard! Better to uninstall the Arduino IDE, and install from zip file. The path should be C:\Program Files(x86)\Arduino\lib and you’ll find the theme folder there. If you’re using a Mac, then the folder will be ~/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/lib). Rename the folder to something else like (say) theme_orig.
Next, download the file attached to this blog post, unzip it, and there should be a theme folder! Copy it to the place where the old theme folder used to be.
Once you restart the Arduino IDE, it will automatically use the new theme! If you come up with new themes, please do share them : )
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