Slashdot Mirror
Best Color Scheme For Coding, Easiest On the Eyes?
Marzubus writes "I tend to do a lot of code editing in vim and sometimes get the 'burning eyes' or headaches. I have been trying to find a background / foreground combination for my terminal sessions which is easiest on the eyes but cannot seem to find any real data on this subject. Does anyone know of a study / data on this topic?"
I use green text on a black background, and it seems to help. A lot of it has to do with the quality and type of your monitor.
Anybody want my mod points?
This comes up all the time.
Personally I find the above best. I can cope with green or yellow text, but find white best, followed by cyan. This whole idea of the modern WYSIWYG desktop trying to emulate paper and thus having a white background is just stupid. Paper is a reflective medium. Screens emit and therefore looking at a white screen is going to give you the office worker's equivalent of snow blindness. Print preview should have a white background, and it should be an easy thing to switch it on for typing up a text document (for true WYSIWYG) but we really shouldn't be using it all day.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
We seem to get this article every few months, and there's never any scientific data to look at.
So, uh, enjoy your 400 posts of anecdotal evidence and personal opinion. Personally I reccomend pastel text on an ash grey background.
One thing you have to remember is that you're not just seeing your screen, but also the things around it (in case you don't own a 30" TFT...). So, personally I have found whatever theme resembles the colors and brightness levels of the area of my desktop (the table, the wall behind it, the amount of light etc.) works best for me, i.e. causes the least strain on my eyes. Which, as a consequence, also means that I'll at least adjust the brightness of my screen with changing daylight hours. /., go for a darkish theme matching the missing daylight in your basement.
So, this being
Old terminal screens were green because of the technology. Not because they were concerned about eye strain back in the 60s.
Actually, colors do make a difference... though I dont know enough to know which ones are better. Also, true flicker free lights help as well - even though LCDs are almost flicker free.
I would guess the optimal colors would be determined by the color temp setting used on the LCDs. Personally, I prefer warmer lighting (warm white flicker free flourescents or warm white halogens), though the color temps on my monitors are pretty high.
Possibly more important is light placing and intensity. Studies (on /. a long time ago, at the link above and elsewhere here; and on the web of course) shows that less light is easier on the eyes for coders and data entry people. It (if memory serves) helps reduce eye strain and distraction. Inotherwords, use enough light to see your workspace, illuminate your keyboard - and not much else. Upward facing lights (ie: "torch" lights, wall sconces, etc) help with this because they bring up the ambient light in the room without the eye-strain issues direct lighting cause for those who code or do data entry. To that, one would add task lighting appropriate to the job they are doing (like a desk lamp over their reading area where they browse their programming guide or stack of papers they are entering into the computer).
Cheaper CRTs (or CRTs in general) have a flicker to them which can make one's eyes hurt. Cheaper LCDs sometimes have slower refresh and response rates that can cause a similar effect - contrary to some people's beliefs that an LCD is an LCD is an LCD. Also, if you compare a high quality LCD to a cheapo one, you can often notice the difference in quality - especially on text rendering... text is often "smoother" looking on the better one - which also helps reduce eye strain.
Generally, for an LCD, one that (accurately) claims it is great for gaming - and has good pixel representation - is an ideal choice. It means it should have a very low response time, and good clarity and contrast. Skip CRTs... they may make pretty images - but as resolutions climb, LCDs beat them in text display.
Keep in mind, much "eye" strain is due to data your mind is filling in and your eyes are trying to follow (or external visual distractions your mind or eyes are trying to absorb).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
their idea of text smoothing is to apply Gaussian blur to it and smudge it a bit. They do not use advanced manipulation like clear type does.
Clear type plays with the individual RGB levels to effectively triple the resolution available. Typical LCD screen these days has about 101 DPI, so even with clear type you end up with fonts that look as good (or as bad) as 300 DPI laser prints.
Anything less than 600 DPI (which even the cheapest laser printers give you these days) is considered pretty bad resolution. I would not print my resume at anything less than 1600 DPI.
I often hear the argument how the Mac OS X fonts are rendered on screen as they will be printed and how they are optimized for desktop publishing. But this is just a bogus argument and misdirection.
What does reading slashdot in your browser have to do with desktop publishing? Or writing your code.
A desktop publishing application is still free to render its fonts the way it wants to and the way it is appropriate for the application, just like for example Photoshop can render images on screen as they will be printed on paper, not only matching the specific printer profile but also matching the specific paper for that printer.
I know a lot of Mac users are in denial about fonts on Mac, but the first step towards solving the problem is admitting there is a problem.
Microsoft has offered a solution with clear type, which is currently the best solution on the market, and others are free to improve it and make it better. I wish more users would demand this from apple rather than ignoring the problem.
And by the way I use Mac Pro at home, and like it in every way, except for the font rendering. Even Linux is better in this regard.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I coded for over 10 years using amber DEC VT terminals, and my prescription on my glasses only changed marginally. And much of that coding was done in 132-column mode.
The important thing to do is to periodically give your eyes a break. Take the time to stop looking at the screen and focus on something distant across the room, office, or out the window. Staring at anything long enough will give you a headache....
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
My eyes never burn no matter how many 16- and 24-hour sessions.
Not yet mentioned but often a problem are reflections.
Turn the monitor off and look at the dark screen as if it were a mirror. If you can see anything recognizable, or there are definite fuzzy brighter areas, then reflection might be the culprit.
I've done some industrial control room display design, where the client still wants things to be easy for the operators. The consensus among human factors professionals is that a light gray background is best (similar to the slashdot color scheme around this comment box). Why?
- To match the screen luminance to your surroundings. Monitors showing black backgrounds will more harshly reflect the ambient light, resulting in annoying glare (unless you work in a pitch black room). The lower the ambient light level in your workspace, the darker your gray.
- To allow the greatest range of text colors with acceptable contrast. For example, try reading yellow on a white background. Using gray gives you the option to transmit a lot of color information while keeping an even contrast. The key, again, is to choose text colors that are not "pure" from the MSPaint palette, but instead are pastel-ized enough to have equivalent contrast on your grey background of choice.
The combination of these two should result in a fairly even constrast throughout your workspace. The goal is to minimize the light correction your eye has to perform when you look from the screen to your surroundings, and when navigating around through different parts of your code.
If there are elements of your work (like BUGBUG in code) that you want your color scheme to draw to your attention, a grey background also lets you choose a more saturated, salient color to really punch up the attention-grabbing factor.
Wah!
You know what works even better? Make the font bigger. The larger the glyphs are on the screen, the less your focusing system has to strain to clearly read the character.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Plus, the chicks will just assume...
You SOLD to your own parents? I can't imagine that. Has America become so materialistic that we sell things to our own parents now?
While quite insightful, I think that would only apply if the monitor was the primary source of ambient light. In a properly lit room, the pupil size should only be very loosely correlated with screen brightness.
:(){
So, the answer is clearly... do whatever works for you!
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Starving college student + parents who think the kid needs to sacrifice something instead of just giving them money = student sells stuff to parents. Parents just donate it to Goodwill if it isn't something they'd actually use. Tends to keep the kid from blowing the money on unimportant things.
Layne
People wonder why the hell I need a 23 point font for IRC when I have 20/15 vision. I just say I want to keep it that way.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
It seems to insist on applying such aggressive hinting to the fonts that they show up far too spindly and with distorted shapes. ...does anyone know how to do this on Windows?
I highly recommend the ClearType Tuner. There's a web version, but the control panel applet is nicer I think because changes are immediately shown.
I don't care for ClearType when on normal strength, but after fiddling with that tool I prefer it over having ClearType off. If you do use ClearType, you should also grab Consolas, a great monospaced font designed explicitly for ClearType.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Actually, my understanding was that the cones receptive to blue colors are on the periphery of our retinas and that the reds and green cones (red and green mixing to max yellow) are more towards the center of the eye. This makes blues more suited to being background colors (probably evolving from our constant exposure to a blue sky) and yellow more suited to being a foreground color.
Actually 6 bit panels with temporal dithering are something of the last couple of years. Older panels from before the response time craze are often fully 8-bit per channel.
The problem is most often the use of an analog (VGA) connection instead if a digital (DVI-D) connection. As especially with cheaper videocards the analog signal is not completly stable most LCD-monitors contain filters to compensate this. However this still does result in a slightly blurred image or in worse cases slight flickering. Some very old S3 videocard at work cannot display a fully stable image on a LCD screen their signals are far to unstable which confuses the monitor.
I also have seen some cheap panels where the backlight was flickering (some Acer models).
but on the other hand Apple's font rendering looks worse than on Linux or even Java's on Mac OS X, and sadly Microsoft is out of their league.
And Mac users that fervently deny there is a problem at all and will gladly bend over and take what ever Apple is giving them, and this will ensure Apple's font rendering stays like this.
Sad, because the platform is nice otherwise.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.