There's a solid usability reason why inverse (light-on-dark) is better for anything with syntax highlighting, like terminals and code.
Many colors of the spectra have poor contrast with white when used in an emmisive light context, like your screen. Yellow on white is illegible because it lacks contrast. The range of distinguishable, saturated colors is much larger on a black background, and you can comfortably add a second palette of less-saturated (dimmed) colors without sacrificing legibility. Your range of choices on light backgrounds is far more limiting.
For situations where there are a large number of potential "highlights" which must be distinguishable, it makes sense to have access to a larger palette of color options.
I agree about the point you make about contrast and syntax hihglighting, but I disagree with your conclusion.
In my experience dark backgrounds with light text are more tiring on the eyes in long coding sessions. Text gets blurrier quicker than when using a lighter background. I came to this conclusion after years of using dark backgrounds, and having switched to light backgrounds.
Personally, I think the question should not be 'white background or black background', because IMO a light gray or blue background is even better. Borland was on to something with their C++ and Pascal IDE's ;-)
> In my experience dark backgrounds with light text are more tiring on the eyes in long coding sessions.
I completely disagree; my eyes tire looking at a light screen much more quickly. Sometimes I'll invert the colors late at night just to make things easier to read.
(Come to think of it, thanks for reminding me that I need to figure out how to get xcalib working with my external monitor, not just the laptop screen...)
I can't read a white background unless I'm in a very bright room. Off whites are better for me. But personally I prefer light on dark. But it's a personal thing.
I rue the day the browser default background colour changed from being light grey to white.
I've also been using solarized light in vim, urxvt, and Awesome WM on Linux. On Windows at work I use solarized light in Putty, Mintty, Eclipse, and Gvim.
I wouldn't say white on black, more like grey and some other muted colors on black.
I remember making the switch from black on white. I was working a contract job with ungodly hours and my eyes were pretty much always red and irritated. I started to notice certain colors on the screen were particularly irritating so I started to fiddle with the color scheme and eventually ended up with the light on black scheme.
I tried it on Ubuntu and while it worked, it caused a lot of issue,it would cause the whole UI to go nuts, when i would close the screen (laptop) sometimes it would fuck up everything when i would re-open it, and also going 100% CPU randomly, making the computer useless.
At first i thought it was just Ubuntu not liking my graphic card, but as soon as i removed it everything went back to nomral.
f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).
Agreed-- not-quite-white on not-quite-black is much less fatiguing for me than pure white on pure black. The slightly lower contrast is quite pleasing, but still allows for good contrast with syntax highlighting.
(I use a variation on the Twilight scheme in Textmate, Eclipse, and Xcode)
I have this (perhaps mistaken) notion that when I'm staring at a screen for 12 hours straight, it's better for my eyes to be looking at a mostly dark screen than a mostly lit one.
At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!
> At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!
I was all about white on black until I realized that I keep being visually fatigued by flipping back and forth into a webpage that was black on white. For me, unless my entire workflow can be white on black, I stick with black on white.
Maybe it's just me but I also find black on white more legible at low brightness display settings as well.
Same with me, though I prefer a very soft grey to full on white. Too many webpages have white backgrounds, and it's painful to flip from a dark editor to go look something up on a glaring white Google.
I was thinking about this survey, I think as is, it tells you who, of those willing and able to take the survey, care enough to tell you about their editor colors.
I am a green-on-black kind of guy, having to do with my VT terminal nostalgia, and I care enough to tell you that. But, I would be surprised if the color-caring folk are a representative sample of all color-preference folk.
Just a tip: try background without completely black or white backgrounds. something like very dark gray or beige feels way better and also seems to work better with a lot of colors and looking at the screen all day long.
That's most likely because ambient light reflections are more noticeable when reflected by a dark screen than a light one. I do much of my coding on the train to and from work where the lighting is quite harsh and the angles unpredictable, so it's a light screen all the way for me.
I tend to use a light to medium grey on black because I don't like the mega contrast of white on black. But for the purpose of your survey, I answered 'white on black'.
Likewise. Also, I don't like highly saturated colors. I've tried a few different color schemes and while I did like Solarized Dark I keep coming back to Zenburn[1] for its muted, low contrast palette. I haven't found anything better.
Do you wear contacts? I've had the same problem with dozens of floaters swooshing around and got to the point where I had custom dark-background stylesheets for everywhere, but found that I could mostly tolerate white backgrounds again with glasses.
Needless to say I still use a dark background in my editor.
I have my XEmacs set up to use light green (#88FF88) on dark blue (#000060). I find this very relaxing and easy to use. I've used this combination for over 20 years.
Pure white on pure black is too contrasty.
Having about the same amount of blue in the foreground and background keeps chromatic aberration, which is worst in the blue range, from being noticeable.
At work my stuff is mostly done through puTTY, I set up different profiles for our Dev, QA, and Prod equipment that use green/yellow/red themes respectively.
At home its default Eclipse theme (light) but that's mostly because of pure laziness. This thread has been a good reminder to change that after my reformat this holiday :)
I used light on dark for a long time, but now I have a Mac with a glossy screen, and a dark background makes it really easy to see reflected objects. So I have switched to dark on light.
I tried to go black on white all the way a while ago, because it is annoying to switch between eclipse + websites and the terminal.
It seems however that the default gnome-terminal palette and most programs are optimized for white on black. With a lot of effort I found an acceptable 256-color scheme for terminal vim, but I gave up and reverted when the output "ack" became unreadable.
My general observation has been that people who like to work in the (relative) dark like dark color schemes and people who like to have lights on like light color schemes.
I personally enjoy a black-on-white color scheme, but if I were in a dark room I'm sure I would find it very fatiguing on my eyes.
Light on dark is nice except when I have other screens open - which is most of the time. If my text editor has a dark background, I find the lighter backgrounds in the periphery of my vision to be more distracting. Hence, I end up using black on white.
Depends a lot on the general setup. On my Mac, it's often a white(-ish) background, whereas on a shell-heavy Linux desktop I keep with a general dark look and feel.
But lately I surprisingly often turn to yellow on blue (TP-like), without syntax highlighting…
White on black for me. Since a few weeks the twilight256 theme is enabled in all my editors (ST2/Vim/Textmate) and it's great with an non-font-smoothed Courier New in the terminal (Vim) as with a bigger smoothed 'Monaco' in ST2/Textmate.
After being on IBM systems for so long I have always enjoyed Green on Black. Green is less harsh than white and it allows more colors to be used to high light items than white on black or black on white.
I seem to alternate between firing up gvim (white background) and vim in a terminal (black background). I don't really notice a difference in terms of readability etc.
I use light, but dark bg has a really big advantadge that you can see many different foreground colors. Its really hard to pick good orthogonal colors on a light bg.
I'm confused: If you give users an option to choose black on white or white on black, why would the default option be relevant? In this particular context, I would imagine users are sufficiently competent to be able to judge the platform after customizing the colors ...
Many colors of the spectra have poor contrast with white when used in an emmisive light context, like your screen. Yellow on white is illegible because it lacks contrast. The range of distinguishable, saturated colors is much larger on a black background, and you can comfortably add a second palette of less-saturated (dimmed) colors without sacrificing legibility. Your range of choices on light backgrounds is far more limiting.
For situations where there are a large number of potential "highlights" which must be distinguishable, it makes sense to have access to a larger palette of color options.