GtkSourceView has the concept of “style schemes” which map language features (types, keywords, strings, etc) to various colors and font properties. Creating them can be a bit laborious even if you’re starting with a color palette prepared. The artistic process is iterative so reducing the time between iterations is paramount.
Furthermore, I have aphantasia which means I need to be able to see things visually because I lack the wiring to simply imagine it in my head.
With that in mind, I spent a little time over the holiday season creating a standalone application to create or modify modify style-schemes. It provides live preview and targets the new features in GtkSourceView 5.x. It’s not a circle app or anything yet, but you can always grab it from the CI pipeline artifacts which include a Flatpak bundle.
It is a simple application with humble requirements.
- Edit attributes about a style scheme.
- Manage the color palette and allow importing color palettes from external formats (such as GIMP color palettes).
- Visually modify styles for global, common, and per-language override.
My hope is that this encourages people to create art, even if you have neurological wiring similar to me.
