Thread

What kind of background-color do you have in your coding enviroment?

#000-ish or #fff-ish?

I was used for a white environment since I tried a dark one, I prefer more dark coding, I found that’s more relaxing for eyes and I even found it more effective to concentrate on what I am doing.

#000-ish, Textmate’s “Sunburst” theme to be exact.  I had white for a while, but it always felt too harsh later in the day.

EDIT: I also agree that it helps me concentrate on specific things.  Black backgrounds are bad for paragraphs, but they isolate code snippets very well.

I alsmost always have the body background set to white, and then have a very subtle colour for the content wrapper, and then a dark font colour (normally between 333 and 666 ish)

But thats primarily due to the fact I design for mass audience, although there are certinally times when a light on dark design looks best

I think he was talking about code editors.  For websites, it’s generally best to go dark on light for readability.

Oh, right, I was a bit sidetracked, as I was actually just coming up with a new site design (dark on white)

As for coding environments, I stick with the light colours, despite doing computer science, the neon green on black effect doesn’t appeal to me =P

It depends on how much coffee or sleep I’ve had. Normally I do white background, but lots of coffee and/or lack of sleep causes my eyes to go all buggy and I need more contrast to stay focussed, and I’ll switch to a dark background.

I’ve been using dreamweaver for a (way to) long time, but recently I switched to e text editor (kind of a textmate wannabe for windows). In e I use a white text on dark background theme too.

Back in my dreamweaver days I didn’t think about it, but now I’m never going back…

Once you go black, you won’t go back….. (I guess :p)

I have been using a custom variaton of the Vibrant Ink theme that comes with Textmate. I’m on WinXP so in e, HTML-Kit and recently Aptana/Eclipse. I will only use a full #000 BG and not a #111 or #333 as it causes the fonts to appear blurry and hazy as if my classes were greasy or I had sleep in my eyes.

In addition (though not asked here) I also don’t use anti-aliased fonts for coding I use a font I found a couple of years ago called Dina which is a beautiful monospaced font that has no anti-aliasing and so looks super crisp when working and reduces eyestrain. I have tried Lucida Console and Consolas but I think that some aliased fonts are easier on the eyes.

Interestingly I don’t like white on black for web pages and I don’t like aliased fonts. I find it hard on the eyes.

Contradiction? Maybe the way the whole fovea thing works with my programmatic eyes focused on just a small set of characters vs when reading requires movement over many characters?

Heres my colours… just be wrong to not be in our business colours!

When I switched over to eclipse+pdt as a primary ide last year, i got used to #fff-ish. I had been using white on black for years before that, with one wonderful fixed width font - Terminus.

Hey Lone, do you code with sunglasses?

#162433 - rubyblue theme on vim

I was just kidding with that last screenshot - no way I could ever stand that!

However, thanks to this thread I took the step and have converted to a darker colour…

I made the colour scheme in Notepad++ - if anyone wants it let me know!

Nice theme… Do you always use N++ ?