Update Dec. 2018: as mentioned in howlger's answer, Eclipse Oxygen 4.7 (June 2017) does now include a way to configure the background color in popups:
See "Colors in interactive popups"
Interactive popups like JDT's Quick Outline don't use the platform's tooltip colors any more, since those were sometimes hard to read.
Old style:
New style:
- Go to
Window > Preferences: General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts
- and change the
Basic > Information background
color.
In that same Colors and Fonts
section, you will find:
Code assist
Basic > Content Assist background color
-> change
Basic > Content Assist foreground color
-> change
java doc
Java > Javadoc background
( overrides default: information background color) -> change
Original answer (2010-2012)
All the various popup background color are managed in Preferences > Java > Editor
(like the one for the completion list popup in bug 133615).
Other background colors are in General > Appearance > Colors and Font
(type background
in the filter field).
But the type popup seems to stick to a system color, which is why you see a black background.
If this is truly the case, it is worth reporting as a bug.
The OP confirms it is not the case, actually:
It was in Preferences > C/C++ > Editor > Source hover background
, and had to untick the "System default" (because the shown color was light-gray!)
On Ubuntu 12.04+, the post "How to change tooltip background color in Unity?" also mentions:
/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
The recent post (December 2012) "Eclipse Papercut #10 – Eclipse on Ubuntu: Fixing the black background color in hover" (from Lars Vogel) confirms:
The relevant properties are tooltip_fg_color
and tooltip_bg_color
.
Just search for these values, the position changes sometimes between releases, currently they are at the very top of the file.
The following setting uses more reasonable colors.
tooltip_fg_color:#000000
tooltip_bg_color:#f5f5c5
pointhi adds in the comments:
I also had to set the environment variable SWT_GTK3=0
before starting eclipse to get it working.
Best Answer
Install the "Eclipse 4 Chrome Theme" from http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-4-chrome-theme
Then you can customize a lot of the Eclipse UI widgets. But not what you want, at least not out of the box. For that you should go to the CSS tab (in Eclipse 4 Chrome Theme) and paste this:
You can change almost anything, the problem is finding out what, and the fact that some things are bitmaps that you can't change (so if the bitmap is dark and you set a dark background you will "loose" the bitmap)
This list of widgets might help, http://download.eclipse.org/rt/rap/doc/1.5/help/html/reference/theming/index.html but they give you generic info on the widget names, not the Eclipse info (with IDs and all), so be careful :-)
== Very late addition ==
Everything you need in one place, including links to a custom dark theme: http://mihai-nita.net/2013/09/19/dark-eclipse/
Mac Screen Shot Example as of Sept 2013 (please be sure to restart Eclipse after changing file):