Fascinated by colors? Colors play a pivotal role in all our visual experiences because of its vibrational energy. Consciously or subconsciously we have a visual perception of how a perfect UI should be. This color theory has been applied by designers to create visually appealing modern user interfaces and contributing to the overall user experience. Having said that, color perception changes from one individual to another, some of us prefer subtle colors and few others like to spice it up a bit, and sometimes change can be good.
We’ve had users requesting for tweaks in our default SQLyog theme, and we had added this feature with the Twilight theme not long ago in SQLyog 10.0 with total control over the theming capabilities of SQLyog. In this post I will walk you through how you can create a personalized SQLyog theme.
The Twilight theme
Along with the default theme, SQLyog comes with a beautiful theme called Twilight. You can enable this theme on your SQLyog, go to Tools > Preferences > Others tab and there you will find a drop down and enable the Twilight theme. You can also view the xml source of this theme.
How do you create a personalized theme for yourself?
You can get started by downloading this zip file and extract the Aqua.xml file and putting it in C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Roaming\SQLyog\themes if you’re using Windows 7/ Vista or if you’re on Windows XP/2003 it would be C:\Application Data\{user}\SQLyog\ . Please replace {user} by your user name, and also create a folder with the name ‘themes’ if it doesn’t exist already. You can use this xml file and start changing the color codes to create a personalized theme for yourself. Here’s a DTD for the same xml file for your reference. The following image will help you to identify the tags that identify the most important areas in the SQLyog interface.
Colors in xml file should be given in RGB format either in Hexadecimal code or decimal code. Hexadecimal code should begin with “0x”. Hexadecimal codes are case insensitive. For example, for white color, one can enter either “0xFFFFFF”, “0xffffff” or “16777215” values.
To change the colors of editor and canvas you can set the color codes in Tools> Preferences> Font & Editor Settings and change the colors. For improved readability make sure you choose a text color in contrast to your background color. Once you have changed tags for those to your desires, do verify that text is always readable. You may decide to reverse black and white or introduce another text color in some contexts for improved readability
You can also set a background image for <mdiclient> but
make sure it’s a bitmap image format (.bmp) and present in themes
folder. You will have to edit the xml file with your filename of
your background image.
<background color1="0xdcf1f1" image="image_name.bmp" />
Like the Aqua theme displayed in the screenshot above? You can download it from here. Do you have a great personalized theme already? share it with us on twitter/ facebook we would love to see it.
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