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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

It's probably been discussed to death, and I apologize if you are rolling your eyes at its mere mention: I really, really like the Solarized colour scheme.

It's now deeply ingrained into my "visual muscle memory" that a terminal without Solarized just looks wrong to me. Even text editors look strange and jarring without those familiar and soothing colours.

It's interesting that the colours in that Swiss Style Color Picker (linked from the article) seem to be taken from a similar visual family of colours (shades? hues? I am not literate in colour's language).

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I used solarized exclusively for several years in text editors and the terminal. But after some years I couldn't stand looking at those blue-ish hues all day. Nowadays I use gruvbox [1] the text editor (but still stick to solarized in the terminal). Gruvbox really is a nice change with it's orange and brown, warm colors, I cannot recommend it enough.

[1] https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox

Hey that is really good. I am going to give that a try in Atom and VSCode.

Thank you! May your code be forever clean, and your backups forever valid :)

If you get it working in VSCode, do share the config template!

Solarized has never worked for me, but gruvbox looks interesting. It looks like it's reducing the blue light from the screen, which might help with sleep problems. It looks a bit like my normal theme after f.lux[1] starts in the evening. (Normally I switch between tender[2] and louver[3].)

[1] https://justgetflux.com/

[2] https://github.com/jacoborus/tender.vim

[3] http://jstap.web.fc2.com/louver.html

I can't look at Solarized for more than a couple seconds, my eyes don't know where to look for some reason. I'm a big fan of the simple Monokai.

I too was a proponent of Solarized, but it has intercolor contrast issues when a blue light filter (Flux / Night Shift / Night Light) is active. I wholeheartedly recommend Oceanic Next instead. The colors itself are also less intense, which is a huge boon :)

I tried it multiple times but the contrast is too low for me.

I've been using a custom RailsCasts-derived (no red!) color scheme for many years, here's a version for VS: https://studiostyl.es/schemes/kodkod

Thank you, I will try that out on VSCode. I've found a bunch of fascinating colour styles in this thread, I'm really glad I made my initial comment :)

It may be a double-edged sword though; I'm now looking at Solarized with a much more critical eye.

I once read a rather compelling argument against syntax coloring. The primary idea was that it's hard to keep it consistent and thus you'll be getting different visual cues every time, thus confusing your visual memory. I actually follow this advice and I'd say it works for me: I don't need any coloring in code. (I only use rather simple coloring on web pages and now, actually, I think I should at least make it optional.)

The thing that bothered me about solarized was the lack of contrast with some of its colors. The light blue on dark blue can be painful to read.

Hydrangea is a somewhat similar theme I enjoy a lot more. https://github.com/yuttie/hydrangea-vim

I agree. Solarized was developed with objectivity in mind, but the choice of a dark-blue and light-beige background colors are completely arbitrary. I use a modified solarized palette with #444444 background and it works fine.

I still like white or off white background, black text and a little color which has kind of stood the test of centuries of use.

Here's a bit of the St Cuthbert Gospel from 1315 years ago https://wiganlanebooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/st-c...

and somewhat similar in sublime text (Calydon light) https://packagecontrol.io/readmes/img/5621a2861cccff9b1d2d2b...

Absolutely love mcedit[0]

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=gerane.T...

I’ve seen a recent trend of terminals with red backgrounds that I’m starting to like more than Solarized. It’s not quite as soothing, but easier to focus.

That sounds interesting, and somewhat counter-intuitive, I'd definitely like to see an example you've encountered. :) (Rather than just Googling some random example)

> shades? hues? I am not literate in colour's language

It's a mess, there are multiple terms that have precise meanings sometimes.

Thank you. I was vaguely aware of different meanings, and I didn't want to use a term that I wasn't sure of its exact meaning.

(That stems from my ongoing frustration with people mixing up terms in various IT arenas like trouble tickets or design documents. "The server is down" can mean a hundred different things depending on who is saying it, and spending time teasing out the true meaning of a bug report or Jira issue can be maddening!)

I used to use solarized everywhere but I've mostly switched to Zenburn. I didn't have a very good reason, I just got tired of Solarized

Zenburn is great! I've used it for many years (I don't like Solarized, for some reason), and then last year I made a blue-ish offshoot of it: https://github.com/mvarela/Sunburn-Theme, which I use nowadays.

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