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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?"
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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