iA Writer inspired theme for TeXShop

Nov 30, 2016

2 minutes read

I enjoy writing using Markdown and iA Writer because of its appealing UI and the focus on nothing but the content. Yet, when it comes to writing scientific articles the missing support for citations and cross-referencing draws me back to LaTeX.

My editor-of-choice is TexShop which works well for me, except, the default color scheme makes it exhausting to work for long hours due to the bright colors, hard contrasts and small font. That’s why I tried to immitate the visuals of iA Writer in TexShop.

Here is the catch: TexShop is rather limited when it comes to theming. It is only possible to define a few colors and the general font. To truly mimick iA Writer, it would also be necessary to define a different font-face for various elements. Moreover, iA Writer uses a font called Nitti Light, which is not available for free. Luckily, someone found the Google Font Cousine to be a good free alternative.

Given the limitations of TexShop, I am pleased with the result. Make TexShop look like iA Writer

If you want to make TexShop look a little bit more like iA Writer perform the following steps:

In TexShop Preferences set the document font to 16pt Nitti or Cousine .
Execute the following commands in the OS X Terminal.app or download the sourcefile from Gist. The colors are based on the Digital Color Meter and this blog post.

#! /bin/bash    
defaults write TeXShop background_R 0.9647058824
defaults write TeXShop background_G 0.9647058824
defaults write TeXShop background_B 0.9647058824

defaults write TeXShop commandred 0.08235294118
defaults write TeXShop commandgreen 0.7098039216
defaults write TeXShop commandblue 0.9137254902

defaults write TeXShop commentred 0.7529411765
defaults write TeXShop commentgreen 0.7411764706
defaults write TeXShop commentblue 0.7294117647

defaults write TeXShop foreground_R 0.2588235294
defaults write TeXShop foreground_G 0.2588235294
defaults write TeXShop foreground_B 0.2588235294

defaults write TeXShop indexred 1.00
defaults write TeXShop indexgreen 1.00
defaults write TeXShop indexblue 0.00

defaults write TeXShop insertionpoint_R 0.08235294118
defaults write TeXShop insertionpoint_G 0.7098039216
defaults write TeXShop insertionpoint_B 0.9137254902

defaults write TeXShop markerred 0.00
defaults write TeXShop markergreen 0.00
defaults write TeXShop markerblue 0.00

If you don’t like what you see, you can easily restore the default theme.

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