YAML to tmTheme

Color schemes for the TextMate and SublimeText editors (tmTheme files)
are stored as plist XML, which is not the most human friendly format to
edit and maintain.

This project is an example of generating tmTheme files from YAML sources
using a Python script. This has a number of advantages:

• easy for humans to read and modify
• little structural overhead
• schemes can be modularized
• allows simple templating

Example schemes:

• Solarized Minimal
• textmate-solarized (example fork)
• SublimeColors/Solarized (example fork)

Related work:

• CSScheme
• Relaxdiego Sublime Tools
• SerializedDataConverter
• tmTheme Editor

Usage

The scripts are written for Python 3, and use PyYAML.

yamltotm.py takes one or more YAML files and generates a tmTheme file. An
optional dictionary can be provided.

usage: yamltotm.py [-h] [-r] [-d DICT] infile [infile ...] outfile

Convert YAML to tmTheme.

positional arguments:
  infile                YAML scheme file
  outfile               tmTheme scheme file

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r, --raw             Do not convert to tmTheme, but output the raw populated scheme.
  -d DICT, --dict DICT  YAML dictionary file

All input files are concatenated before they are processed, so it is important
to divide files in a way that maintains the structure of the content. For
tmTheme files this usually means keeping all top level keys in the first
file, ordered so settings is last. This way all further files go into
settings.

The dictionary is a YAML file mapping identifiers to their replacement. In the
strings of the input file (both key and value), $identifier will be replaced
with the value of identifier in the dictionary. $$ is an escape to insert
a literal $.

tmtoyaml.py converts a tmTheme file to YAML. The generated file is a simple
dump, but can serve as a starting point.

Example

Given a scheme file

name: $name
uuid: $uuid
settings:

# Editor settings
- settings:
    background: $blue
    foreground: $white

# Root groups
- name: Comment
  scope: comment
  settings:
    foreground: $gray

and a dictionary

name: Simple Blue
uuid: e42124f9-7cf8-4477-ad7b-31a7f1050504
blue: '#0000FF'
white: '#FFFFFF'
gray: '#808080'

yamltotm.py -d dict.yaml scheme.yaml scheme.tmTheme will generate

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>name</key>
	<string>Simple Blue</string>
	<key>settings</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>settings</key>
			<dict>
				<key>background</key>
				<string>#0000FF</string>
				<key>foreground</key>
				<string>#FFFFFF</string>
			</dict>
		</dict>
		<dict>
			<key>name</key>
			<string>Comment</string>
			<key>scope</key>
			<string>comment</string>
			<key>settings</key>
			<dict>
				<key>foreground</key>
				<string>#808080</string>
			</dict>
		</dict>
	</array>
	<key>uuid</key>
	<string>e42124f9-7cf8-4477-ad7b-31a7f1050504</string>
</dict>
</plist>

License

This projected is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.