Do I really need to build and publish a plugin using a gradle-based workflow in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, only to customize some UI colors in my PHPStorm IDE? Feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

But probably I am just entitled and spoiled by using CSS for web development all of these years. At least I am sure that I definitely never want to do any Java-related development again :-)

JetBrains: we make the most popular IDEs with best code intelligence and a huge potential for customisation, but we develop them in this mess of a language where you pretty much need our IDE to make the slightest sense of all build configs and whatnot required for even the most basic apps.

"some UI colors"...

A bit of an understatement.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/...

Afaik you're talking about the interface theme, where you can change the whole UI.

I'm not sure why people have the urge to change everything they can...

I think it's nice of JetBrains to allow UI modifications.

@hitko well ... Logical. Isn't it?

XD

after having made some progress and running the validator: error message without a line number ("com.fasterxml.jackson.core.io.JsonEOFException: Unexpected end-of-input: was expecting closing quote for a string value"). I know that Jackson is a JSON parser, and there is only 1 json file that I added so far, which looks valid in the editor and which validates in an external json editor 🤔

@IntrusionCM I know that I _could_ edit a lot more, but this was all I wanted to do: change some UI colors to mimick a VSCode theme that has no IDEA equivalent so far.

@fraktalisman :)

Jackson is a strict parser.

Could it be that theres unicode characters involved? Trailing comma?

next try, seemingly same code: Run verifications: successful (after nearly 15 minutes).

Maybe I am not the first one who though, why not take some time on a Sunday morning to build a small color scheme theme for my editor, only to give up hours later. Maybe that's the reason why there are few themes for JetBrains, and many more themes for VisualStudio Code?

Trying to build and run the plugin. Plugin is built, IntelliJ Ultimate opens an instance of IntelliJ community edition to preview the plugin. I create a new empty project and IDEA dies caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: getService(T::class.java) must not be null 💀🤣

@fraktalisman well.... Visual studio code is a web application.. :)

But yeah. The difference in time should be extreme - one is a compiled plugin, the other "just some CSS atop"

@IntrusionCM "just some CSS atop" is exactly what I love about web development. Clear separation of concerns, rapid development with little overhead, small memory footprint (all of which is only true unless `npm install` of course)

@fraktalisman *cough cough cough*

Honey, have you ever read an CSS parser or took a look at e.g. a browser rendering engine? ;) :) *joking*

Seperation of concerns seem dead, too. (Looking at the fatberg JS frameworks nowadays call a webpage)

But I get what you mean. Most languages for GUI applications, be it e.g. QT / GTK / FLTK / ... Have a seperate specification and configuration for modifying colors of the UI.

@IntrusionCM I did have a look at Chromium's HTML parser (years ago) but still browsers work (a lot better than their source code might make us fear).

JavaScript is not a nice language, and popular JS frameworks and trends make it easy to build single page application front end monoliths that bundle everything, use CSS-in-JS, take a long time to build, and emit crytic error messages, after filling up disk space by inefficient and redundant dependencies in node_modules.

And of course, it is also possible to write an unmaintainable cardhouse of thousands of lines of CSS code. I have seen that before and added my part to the mess.

Same with PHP.