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.
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Full stack web developer. Author of Lumen Programming Guide and Docker for PHP Developers.
