Iām using jEdit. One day, I tried different color scheme. One of them was in inverted color : dark gray background with light gray text. And I never changed : it is more relaxing and less agressive for my eyes
Iām with FlorentG on the dark background / lighter text. Thatās one of the few mods Iāve made to my VisualStudio settings, and one of the first I make to my Emacs settings.
An excellent example of not too much contrast in action!
Can you explain your color choices, please, Jeff?
I like black on white, so I start with that
Iāve always used dark blue for keywords and dark red for identifiers
Beyond that, I was shooting for a āhighligherā effect, using traditional blue, yellow, and green highlight markers.
I believe numbers (blue) and strings (yellow) should have fairly strong highlighting, because theyāre unusually significant in code. I like a background color for strings so I can see whitespace better.
I like traditional green on black for my console output windows, and it also breaks it apart from the black on white code editing window.
Iām not saying these rules should apply to anyone else but me, but FWIW and since you asked.
just Visual SlickEdit in vim mode. and i really, really never had any use for multiple background colors. makes an editor look like a video game; although not so much as your garden variety IDE does. i donāt like video games either; well except FreeCell. to which i return for normal programming.
Someone at my favorite forum (donationcoder.com) started a thread comparing 18 monospaced programming fonts. Others responded with even more screenshots, and websites. I wonāt repeat them all here.
Iāve always used an off-white for backgrounds, just because when youāre staring at something for hours, the cooler it is (white and yellow are the hottest) the easier on your eyes. Pale lavendar or mint usually. Iāve gone through phases of wanting everything to be the same hue, though; pretty, if rather painful.
Oh, and although the eye might be better at picking up greens, monitors seem to be better at displaying a wider range of discernable blues. Maybe itās just because of greater sensitivity, but monitor greens seem to quickly go from murky to neon without much in between.
Iāve been using roughly the same color set for Windows programming since I got my first programming job (an internship back in college). I saw someone coding with bright colors on a black background and fell in love. Most of my programming has been in Visual Studio, and with the advent of VS2003, which gave me the freedom to choose colors other than the EGA 16, I managed to find a combo from which I doubt I shall ever (willingly) stray.
I strongly urge anyone to try it out who is discontented with their current scheme. Here it is, as I originally formulated it for C++ development.
Code window:
Background = black
Text (identifiers) = gray
Operators = white (bold also, if itās hard to distinguish from the grayā¦ admittedly the separate color for operators is less advantageous in C# than it is in C++, because in C++ code parentheses and braces are considered operators, but in C# they are not)
Numbers = blue (something lighter than the EGA blue, which tends to be blurry against the black unless you have an LCD or very crisp CRT)
Strings = Magenta or purple
Keywords = red
Preprocessor directives/keywords = yellow
Comments = green or teal
And for the output window, simple light gray text on black background.
Itās easy on the eyes, which is hugely important. And it makes it trivial to identify the nature of just about any program symbol just by glancing at it.
This requirement may indicate a miscalibrated monitor. Since I got into the habit of setting up monitors using photographerās test patterns, Iāve been able to use black on white with no discomfort or glare. Plus, my photographs look really nice as well.
Hmm, another couple of thoughts (probably stating the obvious)ā¦
Avoid complimentary colours (eg: red on green), as they will throb in and out and cause dyslexia-like symptoms in the normal-sighted.
Your eyes have maximum acuity in the red and green, so blue is not very good for either text or background (only about 10% of receptors are blue, IIRC).
There seems to be a sweet spot for font size, where text is easier to read if it matches the size you read most commonly.