That's most likely because ambient light reflections are more noticeable when reflected by a dark screen than a light one. I do much of my coding on the train to and from work where the lighting is quite harsh and the angles unpredictable, so it's a light screen all the way for me.
I tend to use a light to medium grey on black because I don't like the mega contrast of white on black. But for the purpose of your survey, I answered 'white on black'.
Likewise. Also, I don't like highly saturated colors. I've tried a few different color schemes and while I did like Solarized Dark I keep coming back to Zenburn[1] for its muted, low contrast palette. I haven't found anything better.
I've also been using solarized light in vim, urxvt, and Awesome WM on Linux. On Windows at work I use solarized light in Putty, Mintty, Eclipse, and Gvim.
I have this (perhaps mistaken) notion that when I'm staring at a screen for 12 hours straight, it's better for my eyes to be looking at a mostly dark screen than a mostly lit one.
At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!
> At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!
Do you wear contacts? I've had the same problem with dozens of floaters swooshing around and got to the point where I had custom dark-background stylesheets for everywhere, but found that I could mostly tolerate white backgrounds again with glasses.
Needless to say I still use a dark background in my editor.
I had an eye examination last week and the prescription that I ended up getting for lenses is borderline negligible. Thank you for asking, I also found about solarized theme today from this topic and I use the dark theme for Visual Studio.
I tried to go black on white all the way a while ago, because it is annoying to switch between eclipse + websites and the terminal.
It seems however that the default gnome-terminal palette and most programs are optimized for white on black. With a lot of effort I found an acceptable 256-color scheme for terminal vim, but I gave up and reverted when the output "ack" became unreadable.
Just a tip: try background without completely black or white backgrounds. something like very dark gray or beige feels way better and also seems to work better with a lot of colors and looking at the screen all day long.
I wouldn't say white on black, more like grey and some other muted colors on black.
I remember making the switch from black on white. I was working a contract job with ungodly hours and my eyes were pretty much always red and irritated. I started to notice certain colors on the screen were particularly irritating so I started to fiddle with the color scheme and eventually ended up with the light on black scheme.
f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).
I tried it on Ubuntu and while it worked, it caused a lot of issue,it would cause the whole UI to go nuts, when i would close the screen (laptop) sometimes it would fuck up everything when i would re-open it, and also going 100% CPU randomly, making the computer useless.
At first i thought it was just Ubuntu not liking my graphic card, but as soon as i removed it everything went back to nomral.
Agreed-- not-quite-white on not-quite-black is much less fatiguing for me than pure white on pure black. The slightly lower contrast is quite pleasing, but still allows for good contrast with syntax highlighting.
(I use a variation on the Twilight scheme in Textmate, Eclipse, and Xcode)
I was thinking about this survey, I think as is, it tells you who, of those willing and able to take the survey, care enough to tell you about their editor colors.
I am a green-on-black kind of guy, having to do with my VT terminal nostalgia, and I care enough to tell you that. But, I would be surprised if the color-caring folk are a representative sample of all color-preference folk.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] thread[1] http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburnpage/
Been using it for >1yr and so far so good, more soothing to look at. You?
I like both themes, but have been sticking to the dark one because of display issues on my laptop.
Hope it is fixed soon, want to try it out.
Preview: http://joshkill.com/storage/kolor-preview.png Site: http://joshkill.com/
Squarespace also made this an option in their new CSS editor, which is awesome.
At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!
Sadly not, at least not with flat panels. Google responded to the "blackle" think on their blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...
I'd be interested to see figures for modern monitors.
Needless to say I still use a dark background in my editor.
Terminal: white on black
I tried to go black on white all the way a while ago, because it is annoying to switch between eclipse + websites and the terminal.
It seems however that the default gnome-terminal palette and most programs are optimized for white on black. With a lot of effort I found an acceptable 256-color scheme for terminal vim, but I gave up and reverted when the output "ack" became unreadable.
http://i1-mac.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/Xcode-Midnigh...
To activate, go Xcode >> Preferences >> Fonts and Colors and pick midnight.
I remember making the switch from black on white. I was working a contract job with ungodly hours and my eyes were pretty much always red and irritated. I started to notice certain colors on the screen were particularly irritating so I started to fiddle with the color scheme and eventually ended up with the light on black scheme.
It was astonishing how much it helped my eyes.
At first i thought it was just Ubuntu not liking my graphic card, but as soon as i removed it everything went back to nomral.
http://i.imgur.com/uxpcm.png
[1] http://stereopsis.com/flux/
I am a green-on-black kind of guy, having to do with my VT terminal nostalgia, and I care enough to tell you that. But, I would be surprised if the color-caring folk are a representative sample of all color-preference folk.
http://dengmao.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/vim-color-scheme-wom...