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What Font Color Is Best For Eyes?
juraj writes "What font color and what background is best for the eyes, when you work for a long time? I have found various contradictory recommendations and I wonder if you know about any medical studies on this topic."
When you work with computers for long periods of time, the colour of the font is nothing compared with taking regular breaks. Look out the window. Go for a walk. Make some tea. Bump up the font size. Get a bigger monitor and put it further away.
You are focusing on a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of the problem. There are almost certainly a ton of ways in which you could reduce eyestrain by gigantic amounts in comparison without bothering with something as trivial as font colour.
Any shells that default to black on white, I switch immediately. It's not so bad in a web browser, but there's something about a shell and typing in it that hurts my eyes. Same here. I think it may have something to do with green lying in the middle of the visible spectrum. Similar concept as police/emergency lights being red/blue at opposing ends of the visible spectrum allowing for maximum visibility under maximum conditions.
Does it go on forever?
Green on black terminal windows are the way they are for the same reason old oscilloscopes and radar displays were green on black - it's more cost effective to make a cathode ray tube that glows green. For a long damn time, all terminals came green-on-black, simply because that was the cheapest way to pair a CRT with a keyboard, and hardware terminals were what they used back before PC's were popular. Or invented.
The result of this was horrific eyestrain. Yes, some people can handle bright colored text on a black background. Most get eyestrain or worse, migraines. This is especially so if you switch from green-on-black to black-on-white (like a printed page).
Typists and transcriptionists and grad students and pretty much anyone who needed to refer to a printed reference hated it. In the early '80s, color monitors were pretty much crap for text (too fuzzy, not enough resolution) so there was a boom in the production of "amber" monitors. These used monochrome CRTs that phosphoresced a muted yellow-orange. This wasn't quite as jarring to the eyes.
Then someone came up with paper-white monochrome CRT's, and that was pretty much all she wrote for greenscreens.
Geeks keep it alive, because of nostalgia and tradition. It's looks high-tech and cool, because there was a time when it was high-tech and cool - and because there is an association with Unix, and by extension, Linux. What's more Unix than a DEC vt100 terminal hooked up to a PDP-11? Nothing. That's about as close to the metal as you can get without a soldering iron.
But, please, for the sake of your eyes and the eyes of others, don't pretend there is any inherent advantage to green-on-black for the vast majority of users.
"The retina doesn't get tired... it doesn't move."
Don't be pedantic. Tired doesn't just refer to muscle fatigue and retinas do indeed become less responsive without rest.
A lot of cities have started installing new road signs that are white on blue, or even a faint yellow on blue. They're also making the text paint reflective, but not the background blue. Unfortunately, the cost of replacing all the road signs is prohibitively expensive, but at least new ones going up are a lot easier to read.
I still wish someone would start requiring road signs to be sized appropriately for the speed of the roads. Speed limit signs are required to be larger in places where drivers go faster to give them additional distance (time) to be able to recognize the sign. Road signes need to do the same.
Additionally, we should have cross street hanging signs (the big ones hanging from traffic light wires) on every block in cities... Here in my city, it's hit and miss, some streets have them, others don't. if I'm in the left lane, there's little hope I can read a street sign, even when parked at a light. It's simply too far away to read 3" tall letters... especially on green backing.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Because the screen directly emits light, it is typically more tiring to your eyes. That's why people often prefer light text on dark background for a screen. I generally choose "old school" green or amber on black.