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This weekend I have been playing with NetBeans 6.5 RC2 look-and-feel. The mission was to make the editor look better on my monitor. Issues similar to this has also been addressed several times on codinghorror.com. I have a 22 inch TFT VGA monitor from Acer. They call it P223w and it is crap. Actually it is good for a lot of things, but working with highlighted text is not one of them. I have tried pretty much everything including:

• cleartype tuning (I am on Vista)
• monitor settings
• trying different monospaced cleartype and bitmap fonts
• upgrading JRE
• trying NetBeans on Linux (ubuntu)

Nothing seemed to work, but I noticed that changing the editing area background to a dark grey did make the fonts look a lot better. I normally prefer to have a white background, but I was willing to change that.  Now, if only I could make the rest of the NetBeans interface dark… This wasn’t possible in NetBeans itself, so I started to look for a solution. After a little searching I came across NimROD look and feel. After some tweaking off a NimROD theme and changing of few of NimROD’s icons, I came to fairly decent result. You can see the result on this screen shot. It is not perfect, but it is ok. You can download my theme and my version of the jar-file here.

How to

NimROD is easy to use with NetBeans. Just download a .jar file and theme modify the target of your NetBeans shortcut like so:

"C:\Programmer\Webudvikling\NetBeans\NetBeans 6.5 RC2\bin\netbeans.exe" -J-Dnimrodlf.themeFile=DarkGrey.theme -cp:p C:\nimrod\nimrodlf.jar --laf com.nilo.plaf.nimrod.NimRODLookAndFeel

Shortcut target

I have put the jar-file and theme file in the NetBeans bin folder, but I guess you can put it anywhere you like. Just modify the NetBeans shotcut to reflect your setup. Please notice that your shortcut will most likely be different from mine.

The NimROD theme controls the colors of the Java Metal theme. If you want to modify the theme, then go to the folder where you put the jar file and run it:

 java -jar nimrodlf.jar

NimROD’s theme editor allows you to load the theme file, edit the colors, and preview the changes to see the effect they have on the various interface elements. The beauty of the solution is that it doesn’t make any changes to NetBeans. If you don’t like it, you simply change the shortcut target back to the original.

If you want different icons or make other changes to NimROD’s behavior, then go here to get the source and further info.