Sublime Forum

Customizing color theme

#1

Hi everyone
can someone help me with some trouble I’m having customizing color theme using package control. it was working but now it’s not.

Here are the steps i followed

  1. Installed package control

  2. Selected “Install Package” from the package control menu.

  3. Selected all the color themes i wanted.
    They were successfully downloaded to the “Installed packages” folder on my computer

  4. The selected color themes are now suppose to appear when I select
    “preferences>colors” menu but they dont. Nothing appears.

  5. Also the color schemes dont appear in the drop down menu when I select
    preferences > package control > install package

Maybe I need to reinstall Sublime

Thanks for your help.

Rachel

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#2

This is expected; Package Control’s Install command will only show you packages that aren’t already installed, so they’re being hidden here because you’ve already installed them.

Does literally nothing appear? At a minimum you should get shown a list of the color schemes that ship with Sublime Text.

One of the more common problems that sometimes occurs in this area is installing a Theme when you meant to install a Color Scheme (and vice versa). This can be a bit confusing because one of the color scheme formats that Sublime supports is a tmTheme file, which is a bit of a misleading name.

A Theme controls things like the shape of tabs, images used to display icons and so on, while a Color Scheme is for modifying the syntax highlighting you get inside of files while you’re editing them.

Can you provide some examples of the color schemes you installed?

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#3

Understand that already installed packages don’t show up. But only some color schemes that are not installed on my computer come up. There are so many more listed on packagecontrol.io

(Does literally nothing appear? At a minimum you should get shown a list of the color schemes that ship with Sublime Text.)
Yes. Literally nothing appears…I select “color themes…” which should be followed by another menu, but nothing comes up
see screenshot here:

Can you provide some examples of the color schemes you installed?
See installed packages directory here:

Thank you!

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#4

Hmm… it looks from your screenshots like everything should be working. Something to note is that the Color Scheme... menu entry opens a selection panel (somewhat similar to the command palette) when you pick the menu item; it doesn’t fly out a list of color schemes for you to choose on the fly. So that might be the problem that you’re seeing?

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#5

Hi Terence

I just noticed you replied to my last inquiry.
Literally nothing comes up when I select preferences>color scheme
no selection panel or anything else to choose from.
It was working at one point.

Should I should uninstall then reinstall Sublime.
Do you know how to uninstall?
Is there a way to do that without losing all the packages I already installed?

Thanks

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#6

My first suggestion would be to open the Sublime console with View > Show Console,. and then enter sublime.log_commands(True) in the console. Once that’s done, Sublime will log all commands that are executed as the happen.

With that done, choose Preferences > Color Scheme from the menu (it’s important that you do it from the menu and not the command palette).

Back in the console, this should generate output that includes:

command: select_color_scheme

If it doesn’t say that, or says something different, then there’s possibly a package or plugin that’s making things go wonky.

Generally speaking, in most cases reinstalling Sublime doesn’t have any effect on anything. How you uninstall differs depending on what OS you’re on, but the whole of your configuration (packages, key bindings, settings, etc) are stored in a place that’s not touched by the uninstall.

So if the problem is related to a package being weird or a bad configuration setting and things like that, all uninstalling and reinstalling does is waste time because once it’s back up and running it’s still configured exactly as it was previously.

What you can do is temporary revert to a freshly installed state to see if the problem persists there. This involves moving or renaming the folder that Sublime is storing your configuration in and then starting Sublime, which will make it act as if it was freshly installed.

Once that’s done you can test to see if the problem you’re having still perists, and if it does then the issue is not with Sublime, and we start trouble shooting from there. If it still happens, then the issue is possibly something with Sublime itself.

Instructions on how to revert to a freshly installed state are available here:
https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/revert.html

They can be a bit confusing, but this video shows you how to do it as well:

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