After reading your post I wanted to point out that Aptana does have a new colorization system that allows for background colors to be set on per editor basis. We recently rolled out this new colorization system and a screencast of it can be found at http://www.aptana.tv/movies/aptana_colorization/colorization.html. The screencast showcases the foreground options and we are currently working on an updated screencast that highlights the background options we exposed for our JS, HTML, CSS, XML, and PHP editors (background color, caret color, line highlight color, and selection foreground and background). Our colorization system allows the base Eclipse background settings to be used or they can be overridden and redefined on a per language editor basis. This system can also export currently colorizations to a simple XML format that can be shared and imported into Aptana. The colorizations can be built either using our XML editor and imported or using our colorization interface. Any colorizations idea or feedback would be greatly appreciated, we are striving to expose the entire suite of customizations users want when building their own colorizations.