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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?"
I'm with the parent. Black background. I use Lime Green, with Lime Green for the cursor, and Yellow for selection. It's high contrast, easy on the eyes, and it makes it look like you're programming The Matrix. =)
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This topic was discussed recently here on /. I find it pretty interesting. After spending a significant amount of time reading the comments and clicking links I decided Zenburn really was the best.
I set up Xcode with the theme and I find it reduces eye strain. Now if I could only figure out how to get it to work with Aquamacs.
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I read a study once that said that yellow text on a blue background was easiest on the eyes, and I've been using this for text-only frames in PowerPoints ever since. I used to get the occasional complaint that slides were unreadable, but I haven't since. I've noticed also that when looking at these slides for a while I don't get quite as much of the after-image effect as I do with white-on-black. Give it a try.
A fir bit of informal research has been done by chessplayers on this subject. After decades of experimenting, the choice of chessboard color seems to have settled on dark green on yellow or beige.
This makes sense when one considers that the eye sees colors best in the middle of the spectrum where yellow and green are; and sees worst at the ends where they fade into infrared and ultraviolet.
Actually I have friends and family with dyslexia. Each person responds differently. They are actually procedures now to work out which colours work best for each person. The result is a perscription for glasses with coloured tinting. I know one person who learnt to read in her teens using these, and has now been a primary school teacher for some years (and a very good one at that). For whatever reason she struggles less with dyslexia now and no longer requires the glasses.
Take a look here. Some nifty javascript if you hover your mouse over the background colours at the top of the page.
http://www.dyslexia-test.com/color.html
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Agreed. When working for any real length of time, I always go Green on Black (since long before "The Matrix" came out).
Old-school and much easier on the eyes.
If it works for you, great. But keep in mind, that color combination arose out of economic concerns, not usability ones. Using a green phosphor layer was the cheapest way to build a functional CRT display in the first few generations of computing, and probably still would be if economies of scale hadn't made RGB tricolor just as affordable.
Ages ago when I was using Borland IDEs I got used to the blue background with white text and I still prefer that over anything else.
To be precise Borland default color scheme was yellow on blue, which I couldn't stand, but with white text it's actually pretty good.
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There's a guy at work that still has his set to 60Hz; I can't look at it for more than 5 seconds but he swears he can't see any flicker.
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The old color schemes were well researched. When people were paying $100,000's on their mainframes, they wanted monitors that worked well for their operators. The productivity of the mainframe depended on it. This resulted in many of the old monitors being amber on black or green on black rather than the easier to build white on black monitors.
For color monitors, the white on blue and yellow on blue schemes are the best. Black on white isn't bad; it has the virtue of being high contrast. White on black is still one of the worst color schemes. I never got a good explanation of why black on white is good (think original Apple Mac), vs. white on black is bad (original IBM CGA).
Resolution and refresh rate are also important. Generally, rendering the same number of characters at a higher resolution is easier on the eyes. Thus, the original IBM PC Hercules monochrome card is a much nicer screen to program on than the original IBM PC CGA video card. It wasn't until VGA that the color resolution on the IBM PC was as good as the monochrome resolution, and people started switching in a broad way to color only displays.
Finally, look at purchasing a pair of glasses. Even if you have "borderline" vision, like I do, they may ease eye fatigue. At first, they will probably bother you, until you get used to using them.
Back when I played FPS's, I would be able to see flickr on TV. People thought I was crazy, too.
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I don't even think quality of the monitor has anything to do with it either.
Just turn up the contrast and turn down the brightness.
If you have a funny color balance going on, turn down the blues in a custom color profile. This brings out the reds (relative to the blues) which will further enhance contrast (blue is a contrast destroying color; it is also right next to the hardest color men have detecting, violet).
You can see this for yourself next time you're near some sunglasses. Try on some with yellow, orange, or pink lenses; and look far off into the distance. Particularly if you can look out of the store into a hazy area. Then try on some with blue or purple lenses. The contrast difference is night and day; the extra contrast from the yellow lenses helps your eyes distinguish objects from the grey haze. This is why shooters, skiers, and sometimes wind surfers will go for yellow or pink shades; and almost never blue.
To those environmental factors, I would also add two items: proper hydration (don't go thirsty) and not dwelling too much on an empty stomach.
As for colours, nowadays it's mostly very dark on very light, but back in the pre-GUI days, white on blue was pretty soothing (which is odd, given the higher energy of blue photons versus red...).
When I was a lad, there was a big push in the schools to replace old blackboards with dark green chalkboards. This was supposed to be easier on the eyes.
I use this idea in my Emacs windows, and set a background of DarkSlateGray (47,79,79 or #2f4f4f in HTML). With Emacs syntax highlighting I find it best to leave the default foreground white.
I also recommend the "Lucida Typewriter" font, bold, at a decently large size. Many people use fonts that are just too damn small and then wonder why they suffer eyestrain.
I also wonder if larger monitors are contributing to eyestrain - more eye movement is needed. I have a 15" LCD, equivalent in size to a 17" CRT which was considered something of a luxury when I first got one. Many people would complain about it being too small - but I notice that my monitor is almost exactly the same size as my open copy of a random book, O'Reilly's "Web Services Essentials". I think there are good reasons why books evolved to the page size that they did.
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A little slash-trivia here:
You can also notice the refresh of a CRT if you chew on something hard, like peanuts, while staring at the screen. The crushing action of your teeth vibrates your head just enough to interface with the screen's refresh rate, causing the picture to "bounce" and shear in your field of view.
Most people are right handed but some are left handed. Most people prefer light background and others like me prefer dark. You may be the same. Unfortunately most of the web is pretty much hardcoded to have blinding white backgrounds so after years of slogging through style-sheets and app-defaults I gave up and used the sledghammer approach. I now run everything in a VNC server and use a hacked vncviewer to render the world in reverse video. I'm happy and the patch is here http://www.vnc.cz/pipermail/vnc-list/2006-January/053794.html. I'm thinking of moving to Xvfb with a hacked x11vnc as that might give a more up to date X-server and will work with Windows viewers.
Also works with low and pedal tones on a brass (low brass pref) instrument. Makes the digits on a LED digital clock waver and bounce slowly in addition to seeing screen refresh.
I tend to find the instant on/off of them to be more startling. Turn signals (which are orange over here in blighty) look weird with LEDs because they flash on and off instantly, rather than fading away a little bit.
The color I have found that works best is orange on green. This color pair has to be tuned so that the level of green primary in the orange is equal to the level of green in the background. This ensures that the boundary edge between foreground and background colors is limited to a single color. With the contrast being in a single color, it can remain in sharp focus regardless of the color error of the lens in the eyes or corrective lenses many people use. While red on black would maintain the same sharpness, having an added green base color increases the illumination level, causing pupils to contract to a smaller opening, increasing depth of field and improving focus and visual sharpness. Adding some blue to the base color (approximately pink on dark cyan) can also work. Just be sure that the foreground color has as much green and blue as the background color.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
An optometrist once recommended to me the "20-20-20" rule: Every 20 minutes at the computer, look at something at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
Apple Windows and Linux all have pretty awful sub pixel rendering. Ideally you want a solution that lets you tweak the size of a font infinitely: you should be able to make any word or any letter any size what-so-ever. To my knowledge none of the common sub-pixel rendering systems provide this level of fine grained control.
The only good sub pixel rendering I've ever seen is well explained on Anti-Grain's Text Rendering page. This page explains how bad most sub-pixel rendering is, and how much better their open source method is.
Yes. Here in the US, it's even common for people to sell presents they've been given.
I gave someone an old computer because she needed one, and then she turned around and sold it. And then had the audacity to tell me with a smile how much she got.
Back in the old world, this would be considered beyond rude, bordering on fraud, but "rude" is defined very differently over here. Greed isn't considered a bad word here where money always comes first, and if you give someone something instead of making a buck on it, you're considered a fool. So selling things to your parents would be par for course.
Amber on Black or Green on Black were used because they were the cheapest to manufacture, not because they were the best on the eyes.
I had the luck to work on a green on black monitor in the 80's. It was fine for the first half an hour or so, but by lunch time, everything but the monitor looked pink. It felt especially painful using a 16-color text-based program since my boss was to cheap to replace his new monitor with a color one: everything was displayed in 15 shades of green plus black. That was terrible on my eyes.
Alright, we have a lot people vouching for the superiority of "pricey" LCD screens - I doubt it's the price alone that eases the strain on the eyes. The real questions is - what is it about "pricier" models that makes them easier on the eyes - perhaps if we are able to isolate the one or two or five features that improve the user's experience (as far as eye-strain) we'd be better off when comparison shopping for LCD's. Any suggestions? I'd be interested since I am also in the market for a new monitor.