Rico on Flex

I wanted to change the color scheme of Flex Builder to something more pleasing to the eyes. I’m used to coding with the default color scheme but I wanted to try something new and perhaps as a bonus help me code longer by reducing eye strain and conserving battery by replacing the power hungry white background.

So I started looking for a nice color scheme and found a lot of really good ones. I settled with the Vibrant Ink theme. I thought the process would be as straightforward as downloading a color scheme preferences file and importing it in Flex, similar to the theme pack in TextMate. But most of the preferences files I downloaded apparently only works with the vanilla version of Eclipse with Java, only some colors are being changed in Flex Builder producing an ugly combination of uncoordinated colors.

I ended up doing everything manually, changing each syntax element’s color in the Flex Builder Preferences window. I also needed to know the exact color of each of the elements in the theme so I inspected the source of the theme preferences file and used a handy color picker tool as well to grab the colors from screenshots of the theme.

Here are the colors for each of the syntax elements. I couldn’t find exact counterparts from the theme for some of the Flex related elements so I picked my own colors for them. You can use this as reference for your own customization. It will only take you a few minutes to change everything.