A sublime coding experience

By Michael Argentini
Managing Partner, Technology and Design

As a designer and developer, one of the most important aspects of a development environment is aesthetic. But it's usually the last thing on which a company focuses when creating a development environment.

Luckily there are some great tools out there, at little to no cost, which are extensible and customizable. Lately I've played with several, including Atom by Github, Brackets by Adobe, and my long-time favorite Sublime Text. After weighing the pros and cons, I'm back to Sublime Text.

So in an effort to get the best editing/coding experience, I explored the Sublime Package Control repository and tried a ton of themes and color schemes. I primarily wanted to have a clean, flat design, with a muted color scheme for syntax highlighting source code, a low contrast color scheme for the UI, and a great full-screen (distraction-free) editing experience. Oh, and I'm partial to warm or neutral colors (grays and browns) as opposed to cooler shades (like blues).

I landed on the Material Theme by Mattia Astorino. It was pretty close to matching my particular tastes, but needed changes. So I decided to fork the code and make a new theme focused on me. It's always about me ;)

Fynydd Theme

I ended up creating the Fynydd Theme. You can visit the Fynydd Theme Github Repository to download a copy and find instructions for installation.

So what is it? My goals for this theme were:

  1. Theme with few choices; limited customization needed
  2. Warm-neutral UI color scheme with low contrast
  3. Muted colors for the syntax highlighting
  4. Minimal layout details (not too busy)
  5. Great in full screen
  6. File type icons in the file browser
  7. Able to coexist with the Material Theme
  8. More smiles

So I modified the Material Theme to achieve these goals, with some of the following changes:

  1. Removed all accent color features/options
  2. Reworked the code folding icons
  3. Changed the default UI color scheme
  4. Changed the editing color scheme
  5. Changed some default settings

Instructions for installing it can be found on the Github site. I hope you give it a try and find it helpful. And keep an eye on the repository. I'll post updates there as-needed. Feel free to use the Issues section to leave feedback and requests.

Article last updated on 4/21/2018