Troubleshooting
When you change or update your theme, Sublime Text does its best to dynamically load and apply the new theme.
If during this process, Sublime Text has trouble cleanly reloading assets or updating the UI parameters to the new theme settings, you may see visual rendering artefacts where theme backgrounds are not redrawn or updated correctly via the dynamic reload mechanism.
Below are some common examples and troubleshooting steps if you are experiencing display problems when applying or updating a theme.
After changing or updating a UI theme, the simplest way to ensure the theme is applied properly, is to shut down and restart Sublime Text 2.
If you have copied the Soda Theme folder to the wrong location, the theme will not be able to load its assets and you will see red backgrounds for all components.
To fix this issue, make sure the theme is located inside the Sublime Text Packages directory with the correct folder name. You can find the Packages directory by using the menu item Preferences -> Browse Packages....
An incorrectly loaded theme will look similar to the screenshot below:
During theme upgrades, if a theme asset has changed names or was moved (or removed), it is possible that Sublime Text's dynamic theme reloading may not pick up the change cleanly and consider the asset missing or unchanged.
In those cases, you will see red backgrounds for assets incorrectly interpreted as missing, or visually distorted components for theme assets that have changed, but not been cleanly reloaded by Sublime Text 2.
To correct this issue, you need to "force refresh" the theme. The simplest way to do that is to shut down Sublime Text and then restart it, which will work in most circumstances.
If that still doesn't correct the asset references issue, another technique that will flush the theme is to deactivate, then reactivate the theme and restart Sublime.
Finally, check that there is only one copy of the theme files and that they are in the correct location. Some users reporting rendering issues have found that there was an older copy of the theme either in their Packages/User folder or another location. Having this additional, older version was causing Sublime Text to load both theme copies and mix the rules together, causing odd visual results.