Development Tools / updated: September 19, 2017

The Top Five Laravel Community Editor Themes

We’ve assembled the top editors and themes from hundreds of developers, and we’re happy to share the results with you. The editor theme is one of those bling items that you get to show off a bit.

To find out what everyone is using for an editor and theme, we asked on Twitter and Facebook and had tons of responses. Not surprisingly, the most popular editors from over 700 responses:

PhpStorm (388 or 59%)
Sublime Text (253 or 36%)
Visual Studio Code (86 or 12%)
Atom (58 or 8%)
VIM (23 or 3%)

Based on the results, here is a list of the most popular themes with links for the most popular editors.

Material Theme

The Material theme is by far the most universal theme across all editors and IDEs. Not only is Material a code color scheme, but it’s also a UI theme that transforms the whole editor into a material-based UI.

Material UI for PhpStorm
Material UI for Sublime Text
Material UI for Visual Studio Code
Material UI for Atom

Darcula

PhpStorm was the most popular editor from the survey results, so it doesn’t surprise me that Darcula was also a popular theme. This theme comes with the JetBrains suite of products and provides a nice clean dark theme that is pretty solid all around.

Recently, PhpStorm has made it easier to quickly edit themes, but before this feature, I found it difficult to find complete themes in PhpStorm and stuck with this default dark theme.

PhpStorm ships with this theme by default
Darkula for Sublime Text
Darkula for Visual Studio Code
Darkula for Atom

Dracula

Not to be confused with Darkula, Dracula is a nice theme that has a ton of different application integrations. We’ve written about this cool theme on Laravel News before. The beautiful thing about this theme is how widely supported the creators made it across various products. I typically find holes in themes on around language syntax support, but Dracula is incredibly polished on multiple platforms.

You can get Dracula for all the major editors (and about 40+ apps total):

Dracula for PhpStorm
Dracula for Sublime Text
Dracula for Visual Studio Code
Dracula for Atom

Monokai

Monokai is another default theme that made the top five themes in the questionnaire. This workhorse theme was made popular being the default theme for Sublime Text. Its roots go back as far as early TextMate versions.

Monokai for PhpStorm
Monokai for Sublime: Packaged by default
Monokai for Visual Studio Code: Packaged by default
Monokai for Atom

DuoTone Dark

DuoTone Dark is another polished theme with a lot of thought behind it. DuoTone themes use only two hues, with seven shades total. The goal of the shades is toning down the less important parts of the code and highlighting the more important parts. DuoTone Dark was in our top five, but all of the variations give you some personal variety and are equally excellent.

Originally released as a package for the Atom editor, the design, and ideology behind DuoTone is ported on all of the top editors.

DuoTone Dark for PhpStorm
DuoTone Dark for Sublime Text
DuoTone Dark for Visual Studio Code
DuoTone Dark for Atom

Honorable Mentions

Our results are diverse, so we wanted to throw in some wildcards, house favorites, and honorable mentions.

Material Peacock

PhpStorm is the most used editor from our results, but the theme landscape is arguably the weakest of the top five editors. Material Peacock, by Dayle Rees, is probably one of the most polished PhpStorm themes that don’t ship with the application.

Slime

Slime is another excellent dark theme by Dayle Rees, which has been spotted recently in use by Jeffery Way on Laracasts.

Laravel Documentation Theme

The Laravel Documentation Theme is a theme designed by Jack McDade and ported to a Sublime Text theme by Laravel News Podcast co-host Michael Dyrynda. It’s now available through Package Control in Sublime Text.