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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I am reminded that green-screen text causes eye strain, especially with modern brightness levels, and the slightly electric green vs the old phosphor green.

I spent many, many hours in the computer lab with someone who used white text on a blue background, and adopted light grey on blue for myself. A color scheme that some word processors also adopted.

Neither of us, nor Corel nor Microsoft, succeeded in converting the world to white on blue. I have bigger fish to fry now, but try it out sometime when you're tired of staring at the screen.

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> green-screen text causes eye strain,

You have any data to back that up? My favorite color scheme is green-on-black, followed by white-on-green. I find white and blue backgrounds the worst for eye strain. Low brightness with high contrast seems to be another important factor to reduce strain.

What do you suppose would motivate someone who just looked at an image to start talking about eye strain? Maybe the pain behind their eyes started them thinking about the last time they had this problem?

Actual green screen phosphors are much lower saturation (and brightness) than the green on black image on that github page. That particular green would be more at home on a Hemp Festival advertisement. It's - to me - an interesting example of how terminal emulators are definitely emulators.

This would be pretty close to what a brand new 'green screen' might look like, and older ones would be faded: https://cf.ydcdn.net/latest/images/computer/_OPAL1.GIF

A reasonable overview of saturated colors: https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-avoid-bright-s...

Pure white on a bright (saturated) blue background is probably the worst color pairing you can get. I agree. But I'm not talking about saturated blue, or pure white. I'm talking about light (pale, if you like that word better) blue and off-white (in the ballpark of "easier on the eyes", but that's not quite right).

This is Wordperfect's blue, which is a bit darker than we used (probably closer to YAST2's color scheme):

https://discourse-cloud-file-uploads.s3.dualstack.us-west-2....

FYI, that UX Movement article misrepresents the few studies that it actually cites and offers no evidence for its claim regarding saturation causing eye strain. I know this because someone complained at me recently about a design, linked to that article, and I actually bothered to read the couple of studies it did cite.

Where the UX Movement article says “saturation and brightness have a more significant impact [than hue on arousal]”, one of the studies it cites clearly states that brightness had no impact on arousal. This obvious mistake calls into doubt (for me, at least) whether the author has any objective basis for their claims.

On the other hand, this study which actually looks at colour preferences of people experiencing eye strain [0] appears to show (Figure 1) that people experiencing eye strain don’t select away from green, which seems to refute fairly strongly your claim that green text causes eye strain for everybody. This study references several other studies on the effects of colour overlays so it is probably a good resource for additional research.

[0] https://insights.ovid.com/optometry-vision-science/opvis/201...

I've been known to bust out a royal-blue background with white and yellow text, when I'm feeling nostalgic for Turbo Pascal.

I can't say as to how I've noticed any less eye strain, nor any more, for that matter.

My friend swore by it. I called bullshit a bunch of times. It's such a counter intuitive color pairing. Then I tried it for a marathon lab session, typing away until nearly sunrise. Allowed that he might have a point, chose a slightly dimmer color than he had and stuck with it for quite a while.

At some point it became much more difficult to modify the terminal colors and I gave up. Never got back into the habit. But black on white is getting pretty old lately, and I'll either switch to darkmode or something else before long.

Can you share some rgb values?

I used to use white on blue on my IIgs. My 3b1 (acquired later), of course didn’t have that option. My favorite has been Amber displays.

red on black is better for me. green on black is the next best.

There's the saturation model of eye strain, which I talked about above. As I was collecting links I bumped into another mental model that talks about wavelengths and energies and suggests that red is 'best'.

For me it's the contrast between the background and foreground color that's part of the problem. But I don't think there's anywhere it's written that every human eye works identically to every other (and how bright your monitor is clearly makes a difference too).

Which is why I say things like "you should try it". The world is full of one-size-fits-all solutions and if they aren't working for you, you should try other things. It might not work either, but now you know.

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