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Adding a Theme to Geany-Themes Project

This document is meant to describe the steps needed to successfully add a theme to the Geany-Themes project. This is the stuff I have to do when someone contributes just a .conf file in order to integrate it into the repository/project.

If you want to perform these steps yourself and contribute the complete work as a pull request on Github as some have done before, that makes my life a little easier (and gets your scheme in quicker), but even just the bare (tested) .conf files are a fine contribution.

Style Guide

While there's no strict style guide for how the .conf file is formatted, here's some notes about preferred style:

  • It's easiest to start by using an existing colour scheme that is similar to the one you want to create/port.
  • Use HTML-style colours starting with a pound symbol (#), in lower-case hex notation, compressing to 3 digits if possible. Examples:
    • #ff0
    • #e4b211
  • Use [named_colors] (see Geany Manual) where appropriate, if you want.
  • Most import is just to make it styled like most other schemes.

Adding the .conf file to the tree

The name of the file should be similar to the name of the scheme, unique amongst all other schemes, be lower-case, have words separated by dashes (-) and end with the .conf extension.

Some examples:

bespin.conf
inkpot.conf
solarized-dark.conf
solarized-light.conf
dark-fruit-salad.conf

The file goes into the colorschemes directory.

Testing the .conf file

The most basic test needed is to run Geany from the command line with the -v option and then load your color scheme. If Geany's color scheme parser encounters any problems it will spit out some debugging info onto the console. You should fix these warnings. You can also access the same info by running Geany normally from a shortcut/launcher and looking at Help->Debug Messages.

You should check out what the scheme looks like in a few different language styles. For example, C++, Python, and XML. Using one statically typed, one dynamically typed, and one tag/structured markup language and you can find some weird differences that you might not have noticed by just checking one or two very similar languages.

Some other important, not-obvious things to check:

  • View->Show Whitespace
  • View->Show Markers Margin
  • View->Show Line Numbers
  • View->Show Indentation Guides

Ensuring License and Credits

The top of the .conf file should contain any copyright and license info that pertains to the scheme in a comment. If you ported from another editor's colour scheme, try and keep the same license and credit the original authors. If you create the scheme yourself or are otherwise able to choose a license, it is recommended to use GPL v2 as a default.

You should add yourself and anyone else who have contributed or originally authored the scheme to the AUTHORS file. There's a note at the top of that file which explains how to use it. If you don't wish to maintain the scheme (fix bugs, tweak colours, etc) then add me (Matthew Brush) as the current maintainer like many of the plugins have.

Please use your real name and a human-readable version of an email address where you can be reached.

Adding a Screenshot

This is the stupidest part since it's fully manual. I'll just describe the way I do it, but it may be easier for others to do it differently.

The screenshots are in PNG format. The file should be named the same as the .conf file (obviously except for the .png extensions instead of .conf). The filename should be all lower-case.

The font used in the screenshots is Andale Mono (don't ask why, it just is). The font size is 10pt. If you can't get Andale Mono font (I think it might be a non-free MS core font), use an existing font that looks similar.

The contents of the file in the screenshot are a "Hello World" program in the C programming language, and are exactly this:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#define MESSAGE "Hello World"

/* Prints a message to standard output */
void print_message(const char *msg) {
	printf("%s\n", msg);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
	print_message(MESSAGE);
	return 0;
}

You should turn off View->Show Whitespace and View->Show Indentation Guides. The tab mode should be set to 4 character width real/hard tabs. Turn on markers and line number margin under View menu. Place the caret on the 3rd line (which is an empty line) and click on line four's marker margin to add a mark on that line. Just look at existing screenshots and make it look the same/similar.

I just use the screenshooter tool that comes with my distro (Xubuntu) but many tools could be used to grab a screenshot. I look at existing screenshots and try to select the same region of the screen to capture so that it looks roughly the same size/area as the existing screenshots. It's really not scientific at this point, the key is to just make them all look the same except for the color scheme.

If you're on MS Windows, you could get the Geany instance all ready and then press the Print Screen key to copy the screen contents into the clipboard and then go into a drawing program like MS Paint or GIMP or whatever program you like and crop out the similar region as the existing screenshots.

I would really like to somehow automate this whole step, suggestions and ideas are most welcome.

Updating Meta-Data

There are some meta-data files in the repository that (are not yet) used by some plugin to list/update geany schemes. It's simple to update these files by running make indices command in the root directory of the tree.

If you don't have GNU make (ex. on Windows), don't worry about doing this step, it's entirely trivial for me to do it.

Making a Pull Request

The pull request to add the scheme should ideally be a single commit with all of the required changes made.

Here's a pretty good example of a commit to the repo:

https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-themes/commit/d81d7b5142034f89e9e19eac58bd43ed54121888

This is the actual commit I made while writing this guide:

https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-themes/commit/f9043abdd7247b742176df5d0d867656f24f9f88

I find it easiest to clone the geany-themes repo, checkout a new branch (ex. git checkout -b my-new-theme) and then keep adding changes to that until it's all ready. From there you can use git rebase --interactive to squash the commits into a single commit and add your nice descriptive commit message for the whole lot. With your branch having a single commit difference from Geany-Themes master branch, create a pull request on Github to get me to add it into the master branch.

These are just recommendations, however you provide the scheme, I'll try and get it integrated into the repo. Just don't expect fast response time unless you've done most of the work for me :)