If you have used Zend Studio you know it is a powerful IDE.  You also know that the editor pretty much blows. Changing the text colors is a task only slightly less unpleasant than dental surgery.

I have seen several requests for a dark color scheme, which I have spent the better part of two years coming up with.  It is based on the “dark” theme from Coda.  Get it here.  BACK UP YOUR PREFS FILE BEFORE IMPORTING OURS!  Don’t blame us if this screws up your system.

I have always critical of Zend ever since they moved the Studio platform to Eclipse.  5.5 was incredible but 6.x through 7.2 were horrible.  8.0.x offers a bit of hope that in the future it’s going to suck less.  But it’s a necessary evil that we need to use it for our legacy projects.  I just wish someone would come out with a PHP IDE that isn’t built on Java.  (We still love NetBeans which is Zend Framework-compatible out of the box.)  And yes, we own licenses to Komodo 6 but it has it’s own issues (can’t see files and code outline at the same time, SVN is still screwed up since v5).

Anyway, if you can improve on the color scheme please let me know.  Maybe we will put together a Subversion repository or something that changes can be committed into.

Edit #2:  1/14/2011 – 3:06 PM

Thanks to everyone for the kind words and gratitude.

This isn’t the prettiest solution.  As a matter of fact it looks pretty hideous in the preferences view since you have to set the background color to dark for every single tag.

Edit #1: 1/14/2011 – 1:37 PM

I am astounded by the number of requests for this file.  Below is a screen shot of how it looks for PHP: