Bobros

Making your life a bit more beautiful

pip install bobros
bobros --help

bobros is a tool for setting the background colour for files in PyCharm project navigator.

It was mainly created for working with Django projects where you can have lots of app folders, all of which may contain files with identical names like views or models, etc. It's much easier to work with them when you can easily tell them apart and can easily see where one app ends and another one begins in your project navigation panel. Colour-coding the app folders makes that task a lot easier.

However, it turned out that doing that using the standard PyCharm mechanisms is not that easy. You have to navigate through several settings tabs and do a lot of clicking and typing. Well, there must be a better way!

Bobros takes a simple config and generates the correct xml files to make your project files colour-coded. It also supports different colour-themes.

Sample config file (i.e. my_config.yml):

themes:
    dark: # defines colours for a theme named "dark", names can be arbitrary
        one: aabb00 # defines colour "one" to have the hex value of aabb00
        two: bbaa00 # defines colour "two"
    light: # defines colours for a theme named "light". Should contain the same colours as other themes
        one: 99ff88
        two: 9988ee

items: # defines colours for the items on disk
    my_file.py: one
    my_file_2.py: two
    my_folder: one

Some special values:

• ~ The "home" folder: in Django projects the settings folder by default has the same name as the project folder. It's nice to have the settings folder the same colour in all your projects

• Problems, Non-Project Files special names used by Idea for files/folders containing errors or not belonging to the current project

To apply a theme in a config, run the following from the root folder of your project:

bobros charm my_config.yml -t dark

You could also have a less fancy config, without themes:

colors:
    one: aabb00
    two: bbaa00

items:
    my_file.py: one
    my_file_2.py: two
    my_folder: one

To apply this config, run

bobros charm my_config.yml

It is an error to try to apply a config with themes and not providing a theme name on the command line (i.e. the -t option), to specify a non-existing theme or to use a config without themes and providing the -t option on the command line.

Generating colours

I like my files to have colours of the same saturation and luminance, but of different hues, so bobros has a command to generate such colours from a given initial colour:

bobros make-colors b1e3be --points 10

This will generate 10 such colours, you can then copy the values to your config file and assign them to your items.

Checking configs

You can run

bobross check my_config.yml

from the root of a PyCharm (or Idea) project. For now, it will check if the config specifies files that do not exist in the actual project.