As much as I love the dark theme, I am a bit less excited about the editor colors. The text editor has the same background color as all other panels, which makes it harder to differentiate the various sections of the IDE. Also, the pastel-like editor colors on a not-too-dark background make the text look a bit washed out. Of course, this is all just a matter of taste and you may completely disagree with me.

Alternative Theme based on Icon Colors

One of the very nice visual touches in the new IDE is the redesign of most icons using a uniform color scheme consisting of only 6 colors. The great thing about this scheme is that it works equally well on light and dark backgrounds.

David Millington has an excellent post about the rationale behind the new icon designs and color scheme. The following editor theme is based on this color scheme.

Visual Studio Code based Theme

However, if you prefer a softer color scheme for the editor, then you can take a look at this theme based on the default theme of the Visual Studio Code editor.

Installing an Alternative Theme

You can find these themes in our

JustAddCode/AlternativeEditorThemes

repository on GitHub. To install a theme, you use the migration tool that ships with Delphi. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, follow these steps:

Shut down the Delphi IDE.
Run migrationtool.exe, which you can find in the c:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\19.0\bin\ directory of your Delphi installation.
Choose the option “Import settings from a migration file” and browse for one of the theme files (with an .idesettings extension) .
On the next page, accept the defaults (to import all settings).
On the page after that, select the IDE version you want to import the settings into. You should only select version 10.2 (with update 2) or later, since the theme isn’t designed for earlier Delphi versions.
Finish the wizard.

You don’t have to worry about your other settings. Only the text color settings will be replaced. If you don’t like the theme, then you can always revert back to the original theme with these steps:

In Delphi, select the “Tools | Options…” menu option.
Navigate to “Environment Options | Editor Options | Color”.
Set the “Color SpeedSetting” to “Dark”.

More Themes

If none of the editor themes are to your liking, then I suggest you take a look at the

Delphi IDE Theme Editor

. With hundreds of themes to choose from, there must be at least one to your liking.