If the majority of the screen is light, my pupils contract, which results in less eye strain to keep everything in focus. I can use smaller fonts & maintain readability. I used to love the Zenburn color scheme, but that just doesn't work as well for me anymore.
Note - I'm not talking black on white. I'm talking dark grey (ebebeb) on light grey (0f0f0f).
On the other hand, you could be myopic and under-corrected - and so suffer more when the pupils are relaxed (similar to the Night Myopia effect).
I do find it almost impossible to use dark background IDEs (such as XCode and Eclipse), because of the other GUI elements cluttering the screen (which are usually light). And this causes a lot of eye strain, because the amount of incoming light is still huge, while most of the screen is dark, relaxing the pupils and burning the retina.
Since most of my time I'm on Emacs or the terminal, I'm cool. Switching to a browser still hurts - one more incentive not to look at Hacker News while working ;)
This is really interesting. I am severely myopic and have always preferred a black background.
However, last week I had cataract surgery and now with a +27.5D (!!) IOL implant in my right eye - the only eye I have, I'm not so nearsighted as I used to be (20/80 now instead of 20/200), but I am still experiencing eye strain when looking at the computer for any length of time. After switching my editor to a white background, things got a lot easier to see.
Mind you, I am only a few days post-surgery and I haven't yet gotten new glasses. I was also having a lot of issues with colorblindness and contrast sensitivity, as well as a lot of "double" vision (which was more accurately "I see 8 of those things" vision). These are now resolved, as well. All of those will factor into the equation a great deal, I'm sure, but I do find that after the cataract surgery, the light background makes for less eye strain.
I switched color schemes from "Blackboard" to "Dawn" but my Blackboard theme may have been modified a bit. I've been using it for so long, I can't remember. It almost seemed as though there were too much contrast with the dark background.
I'm still not at a point where I can use the computer for more than about an hour at a stretch. It's amazing how mentally and physically taxing adjusting to better vision can be.
With regards to brightness of the monitors, I keep it reasonable - about 25% of what the monitors could do.
Can you expand on this? Would myopic individuals be more likely to prefer dark text on light background?
I actually find looking at white-backgrounded web sites (like HN) to be fatiguing these days.
Reading black on white from a backlit screen is akin to reading the wattage information from a glowing lightbulb. It hurts.
I've often wondered why computers in general still persist with black text on a white background. I'm convinced in 50 years time there will be legions of people with eye problems that could have been avoided by just inverting colours on active displays.
For this reason I only like ePubs too as you can invert the colours easily when reading on a tablet.
Websites with white-on-black cause afterimages which persist for several seconds and are really distracting / tiring.
[EDIT] TO clarify a bit more - I use 2x 24" monitors at the recommended distance (arms length). This means that for better or worse, most of my field of view will be taken up by the monitors, and so most of the light that hits my eyes will always be from my monitors.
It has a dark version, which I use for coding, and which I think works better with syntax highlighting. It also has a light version, which I like for regular text editing.
Both have nice contrast, and you can toggle between the two with a single keypress.
edit: Lasted about a half hour for me; too low contrast and the cursor seems to be invisible, so impossible to tell where I'm about to type.
I like the look of solarized, but in practical use it doesn't have enough contrast for me.
This is actually what makes the deal for me. On my bright, (nonprofessionally) calibrated IPS screens most color schemes are just too much of an eyestrain for long coding sessions. Solarized (either Dark or Light) is deliciously smooth and pleasing.
Syntax highlighting was the one last thing I regretted leaving TextMate for, but yesterday I spent a day tweaking my own theme (based off of Tomorrow-Night https://github.com/ChrisKempson/Tomorrow-Theme , which does have a vim theme but I found it lacking and not at all like the TextMate version) and I like it so far. But it's nice to finally know of another theme with nice colors. Thanks :)
In fact I think I like the string highlighting on this one, I might try it on mine :)
What do you think about this? Do you feel you work better with a black background, or do you just use one because it's more cool/retro looking than a white background?
Looking superficially, I could only find articles claiming the exact opposite – like http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on... – but they all seem to quote the same and old (1980) research.
Next time you feel strained looking at your screen, look around it at the other lights in the room/outside and notice how even the brightness is.
The thought of people consciously using screencasts to promote their dark theme agenda made me chuckle.
I'm guessing that the majority of coders today started out on Windows. Notepad is dark on light, so that became associated with the "common" user. The first peek under the hood would have been Windows command line or Linux. I could see that a dark background would feel more 'tech'.
edit: Also, default colorschemes on terminals are dark, why is that?
[edit: i just installed eclipse 3.7.1 and it picks up the general theme correctly, but the editors have dark text on dark backgrounds and i don't see any simple way to change that without changing each font setting in turn.]
you can also build your own scheme on the site, building off someone else's. that's easy too, and then can be loaded by the plugin. my own is at http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org/?view=theme&id=5095
// A lot has changed since.
"Everyone" didn't know any such thing about amber text, it was just a less bad choice given the technology of the day. It was cheaper to manufacture a display that produced bright text on a black background - fewer pixels to light. Green text was very popular in dumb terminal days. Didn't make it readable (or unreadable). It was just a step in the inevitable transition to more book-like displays. If you enjoy reading light text on dark backgrounds, go back a few years and peruse the mostly unreadable issues of Wired Magazine.
However, this survey is useful in that it reveals that there is indeed a passionate core of users who prefer dark backgrounds. The survey author seems to understand all this, as his conclusion is that it is definitely worth adding a dark background option, but that it may or may not be the default.
Pepsi won a majority of the time on first taste because it is instantly sweeter.
But long term people prefer the flavor and full experience of Coke.
In my experience this translates: the dark-theme instantly feels more clear and crisp.
But over time I find that the dark creates too much contrast and slows me down.
With coding, my preference is exactly the opposite (I prefer a black background). The difference is that the structure of a program is much more complicated than the structure of prose and that structure is more apparent with white/colors on a black background. Further, the colors of syntax highlighting seem to be much more apparent when displayed on a black screen rather than on white.
The compiz negative (Super N) and brightness (Super B) plugins allow me to use bright themes when the sun is pouring in and dark themes at night when illuminated only by xmas lights. I also use a greyish theme with a redshift type program on Windows.
When reading HN or other obnoxiously bright sites at night, +Super N and kaboom, grey on black. Give it a try.
Remember that the ergonomic choice for many years was amber monochrome on black and it was quite soothing.
http://studiostyl.es/schemes/son-of-obsidian
I do not like the contrast of Solarized (low contrast) nor monokai (super high contrast with bright pink). Son of obsidian is a good in between.
In summary, I want it super-easy for me to reverse or otherwise change my theme when I'm taking a screenshot, perhaps even embedding it into the application.
I must say that other users may well like it the other way, because when I used to browse for GTK themes on the http://gnome-look.org/ site, many of the new themes were cooler when they were darker...
BTW, I just found out the http://gnome-look.org/ itself is whiter and brighter. Oh the joy! Cheers.
Related, I always figured the dark desktop UI themes (eg, for GNOME, KDE, Windows, etc) were highly preferred by people working in dark rooms, like a studio or college dorm at 3am. Once upon a time I liked these, but since I'm less nocturnal these days I prefer lighter themes.
See here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/498698/white-light-vs-bla...
