"Best" background color for your editor

Question

I have a black background with white characters but I want to know if other combination (white with black characters or yellow characters or blue background like turbo pascal) work for you.

Do you have any info about which combination is better for the eyes? Why the default is white with black chars?

Answer 1

I use black with yellow characters, but I think white allows for more flexibility in terms of syntax highlighting.

Answer 2

Do you have any info about which combination is better for the eyes? Why the default is white with black chars?

Then the screen looks the same if you would print it.

Some guys i know use black background and green letters in mIRC. Maybe this is also nice to use in your IDE?

I stick with white background and black letters.

Answer 3

I think that if you have a good quality LCD monitor, the black background for an editor could be slightly better for the eyes.

Answer 4

I use a 25% gray (specifically RGB(240,240,240) or #f0f0f0) background with black characters. I find that it alleviates the glare produced by a pure white background.

It's notable that Jeff Attwood blogged about this as far back as Sep 2006.

Answer 5

Try reading this or this.

Answer 6

It is actually something that comes down to personal perception, some people can just read certian combinations of colours better than others. The ambiant evnronment and equipment you use can affect things also.

FWIW in an ide I am white background and mostly black text but for shell windows I am green text on a black background.

Answer 7

Most of my Emacsen are configured to use yellow letters on a blue background. Supposedly that's quite a high-contrast scheme that is easy to read due to to high contrast, but it doesn't always play nicely with the font-lock modes, so you tend to tweak those colour schemes a little as well.

Answer 8

I find zenburn (vim) very pleasing to the point that I used it as a GNOME theme and for Eclipse. Works great and I don't get too much eye strain

Answer 9

This article gives you many visual studio settings for download.

Answer 10

This has been in my ~/.emacs for some years.

(setq default-frame-alist
     (cons
      '(foreground-color  . "gray60") 
      default-frame-alist))
(setq default-frame-alist
     (cons
      '(background-color  . "black") 
      default-frame-alist))
(setq default-frame-alist
     (cons
      '(cursor-color      . "DarkRed")
      default-frame-alist))

Never considered changing that... which I suppose makes me environmentally lazy.

Answer 11

I use Jeff Atwood's lighter scheme, I found it to be the easiest on my eyes. Also, check out Rob Conery's dark scheme. Both work great with ReSharper's colors and squiggly lines.

Answer 12

While many find darker backgrounds easier on the eyes, I recommend a standard white background - especially for developers with two monitors. The vast majority of apps/websites have white backgrounds. Thus, having a dark background on one monitor and white on the other often causes eye strain each time you view the other monitor. Looking left to right requires your eyes to constantly adjust to a large difference in brightness.

Answer 13

You are probably best optimizing for syntax highlighting. Though even more than that my productivity increased the most going to two high-res monitors.

Answer 14

For coding windows, I use a dark blue background. I started using dark blue when I was working with cheap LCDs in 2003 that couldn't reproduce black correctly. The blue stuck; I use a light tan text over the blue.

For terminal windows I use black background with green text and a red highlight color.

15 years ago I used black-on-white color schemes, but as the number of monitors on my desk has grown, too much white is often too much light for staring at it for many hours a day.

Answer 15

i think it depends on your screen and your eyes, but one thing is clear: if you have normal eyes or you are a bit short-sighted, then the green color is the sharpest one. in the other case, probably red. a blue color could a bad idea since the cone cells are less receptive for that wavelengths. after all some grey as background is always good. i often used some slight blue but very grey as background, but nowdays i don't care so much :)

read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell and keep in mind that the cone cells density varies highly between humans, just the brain compensates this so that we all see the same colors. So, it's probably a very specific problem and you have to try your own settings.