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Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

I made a (what most people would consider terrible) vim color scheme that has no blue light in it (it's like an old amber terminal). Initially I thought I would hate it and switch back in a couple days/weeks, but I actually find it very nice, and switching to anything w/ blue light or a "normal color scheme" with blues and greens now weirdly feels like an assault. Feel free to give it a whirl: https://github.com/camgunz/amber

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Installation instructions, for those with Drosophila-like memory (like me):

  $ md ~/.vim/colors
  $ cd ~/.vim/colors
  $ curl -LO https://github.com/camgunz/amber/raw/master/colors/amber.vim
  $ vim amber.vim

in vim

  :colorscheme amber
  :set background=light
  :set background=dark

I like the look of it, though the syntax highlighting isn't as distinguishing as default (for java).

BTW: I code on a phone, and set the colour temperature to warm (at night; cold during day).

Code on a phone!? When I first started it was an orange terminal, DOS3 something. @hyperpalluim is giving me the "Future Shock" I used to hear the old folks talk about...but still using VI?! On the phone!? I'm having some really mixed feeling now

What’s your setup?

http://termux.com, tmux, vim, git, ecj, dx

aapt, apkbuilder, signer (for android apps)

bluetooth keyboard + ARM quad cortex-A53 1.3 GHz, 20 GFLOPS GPU, 1 GB RAM - for 70's era unix tools, it is unbelievably powerful. Specs in the billions.

For those that don't use vim, here are roughly the colours

- orange #ff8700 for text

- darker orange #d75f00 for bold

- lighter orange #ffaf00 for comments

- red #5f0000 for errors

- dark grey #1c1c1c (and #121212) for backgrounds (text in the lighter themes).

- off yellow #875f00 and #afaf00 for some status/wild menu

- git diff orange #ff5f00

I've read that even a monitor with only warm-collided pixels displayed on the screen will still emit "blue light", in which case this wouldn't solve the problem correctly. I wonder if this is true?

Blue light is only emitted if the blue subpixel is lit (well, except for some backlight leakage on LCDs). So it is possible to sit in front of a screen without any blue light. Of course, this means you can't produce most colors, so it's not ideal for general use, but it is possible.

When in bed at night, I often use a software filter to cut out all but red subpixels. This allows me to read or work without causing melatonin suppression. Just clamping blue and green to 0 is a very poor solution though; I should swap to a proper "redscale" filter (think greyscale, but only red subpixels) that is based on the luminosity of the source image. The dumb filter has definitely confused me a few times when I can't seem to highlight any text.

I suspect this isn’t the case with an OLED, since it wouldn’t even emit any blue light in the first place if those pixels aren’t on. However, a typical laptop / monitor will have a white backlight that then gets blocked. Often there’s bleed through even if the screen is completely black.

If someone with more specific knowledge about screens corrects me, I yield to their judgment. :)

tech writer who specializes in TV screens here. You are indeed correct. With OLED, no bleed-through at all exists since there is no backlight and unless specific RGBW pixels on the screen are activated, they emit no light at all basically. On the other hand, even the absolute best consumer market LCD/LED screens leak at least some backlight glow, though in high quality models it becomes very faint due to local dimming zones and high quality light blocking.

Wait for them to repeat the study with orange light and then completely stop using vim. Then even orange will feel like an assault.

Those who want this look (or other retro looks) in a terminal [1]

[1] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Oh yeah love CRT. Actually started out trying to use that but I don't have a great graphics card so it was a little laggy. I highly recommend running a terminal in gVim though; I've found it to be the best terminal on Mac OS.

I was about to create an emacs version of this theme, but as usual, C-x-M-butterfly exists and there exists a version of this theme: https://github.com/emacs-jp/replace-colorthemes/blob/master/...

If you're on a Mac could you just use Flux or Night Shift to achieve the same result of removing all blue light from your display?

Yeah and there are other tools for other environments. I've found it hard to keep my setup aesthetically pleasing with them, and if you're doing anything with color or anything low contrast, they can make your life pretty hard. But yeah I mean, use whatever works for you, definitely.

Somewhat similar to my terminal text color code. Mine is FCAF3E on 150C0C background, which I find a bit more neutral and gentle to the eyes. The secret is to avoid pure or saturated colors which I found sometimes can be a punch in the eye, so I usually start with a color then lower its intensity and add a bit of the others to make it less hard to look at.

Yeah I try and make color schemes that work in 256 color terminals and I really lament the lack of options sometimes. Could be worth doing something clever, but having been a terminal Vim user for so long, I've built up a lot of resentment against color schemes that look great in GUI but not so great in terminal haha.

Similar to the Hacker News pallet, I like it!

Looks cool, thanks for sharing. It reminds me of the Portal 1 credits screen.

"dark" looks nice. Thank you!

Working on a compiler? Do tell!

Oh yeah I've been trying to give the world another unwanted programming language for a little while. This snapshot is from a tool I'm writing to generate C bindings--today glibc, tomorrow the world, etc.

Nice! Working on a transpiler myself :). https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/e1bdadab4f9691c8564b...

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