Solarized
ethanschoonover.com
ethanschoonover.com
It's kinda funny how, before Solarized, I would see tons of gimmicky themes like some that were going for a Matrix or "classic terminal" feel, going all in on a certain theme but eschewing real usefulness. I want my basic terminal colors to remain adjacent to their intended hues! I want different keywords/tokens in my code to be distinguishable!
Ethan's application of color theory/science to the landscape was like a beacon in the darkness.
Before Solarized, I used Zenburn (I actually still do in some environments, I'm not too keen on the blueish hue of Solarized backround.) I also like Tango Light/Dark.
By 2010, when Solarized appeared, the larger portion of the people that started coding on a light text on dark background had already retired.
Solarized did a good job in terms of distribution, I give you that 100%. But it is not the most important theme in history or anything of the sort.
(I went sideways and left software development entirely. But I'm 58 and very much still working with text on screens and routinely use dark mode.)
EDIT: Ah, checked your profile and history and it seems like you've become a writer? Hmm... maybe I could do that...
(BTW, the SSL cert for your website has expired!)
EDIT2: Thanks for the advice on writing, all! Honestly, I was thinking of taking the technical writer route. I've always been pretty good at authoring things like technical specs, so it seemed like a potential "lateral move," albeit one that probably pays a hell of a lot less than software development. I'm suspect that technical writing has some of the same soul-crushing aspects of software development, so perhaps it wouldn't even be worth it.
Unless you can write proficiently in the romance genre. There’s gold in them hills.
You'll find some of them on Royal Road. Lots of fantasy, litrpg, xianxia - fluffy serializable things.
My three reviews were solid (all five star), but if you’re not writing to the site genres you’ll struggle to find an audience. One of my reviewers even mentioned they’d never read a techno thriller before.
Also tried Wattpad and Inkitt - basically zero views on the former, hard to say on Inkitt. Their stat reporting is super bad. Got one review there, so presumably less readers than RoyalRoad.
They're interesting from many angles, although I think they distinctly lack in mass appeal. Unsong and HPMOR in particular seem to me like the kind of thing you would either love deeply, if they're in your wheelhouse, or otherwise find positively insufferable. (I loved both).
Worm, on the other hand, while in need of some editing, seems like it would be absolutely killer as an animated series in the vein of Amazon's adaptation of Invincible.
One issue that seems to come up in this space is the authors having issues getting into publishing deals. For instance, the author Worm don't currently distribute ebooks because of nebulous concerns about the effect on future contracts. Unfortunately this seems to leave such works in a state of legal limbo.
Idk what my point is, just rambling at this point. I have very much enjoyed all the stuff I've read in this area so far though.
Sold my first short story for actual money aged 21.
First novel sold when I was 36.
... Stopped doing other stuff (mainly freelance computer journalism) to sub the fiction when I was 42.
The sole consolation is that I'm doing okay now and my career didn't really get started until most successful pop stars are at the touring-with-the-greatest-hits-playlist stage (or have given up and gotten a job as an accountant).
On romance; yes, it outsells all other commercial fiction genres combined. But don't assume it's easy money: there's a lot of competition, and every genre turns out to be much harder than it looks once you dig your teeth into it.
I didn’t mean to imply that those authors don’t work hard or that those stories aren’t crazy outliers. Just that there’s more money sloshing around from a lot of avid readers.
As an aside, please keep doing what you do. Accelerando hooked me deep when it came out, and I’ve had a ton of fun reading through The Laundry Files. Thanks for optimizing your career for something other than money.
I was certainly not referring to you, but people who were in their 20s during that time.
Commodore 64s defaulted to white on blue.
Apple II and IBM machines all started out with monochrome white (green, amber) on black.
There was a long and significant period of reaction to the light on dark UI's where a lot of applications arrived either with light on dark as the default or with no option to change it, so I can understand why someone would see solarized as that start of a change towards (renewed) support for light on dark interfaces, though I do think it's overselling its importance.
We're not that old!
I began coding in the late 80s as a hobby. It led to a career in programming, beginning in the 90s, just out of high school. Turbo Pascal was my first "serious" language. I'm not retired yet.
White text on Blue background.
[dot matrix printer sounds]
Solarized dark theme to me looks just like several other similar themes that predate it ex: https://superuser.com/questions/156979/how-to-i-use-textmate...
But I assume you have something specific in mind here?
solarized demonstrated how to apply colour theory/science to the landscape.
I would add that it has been not just the theme that serves as an example, also the _how to make_ a theme following those principles.
Fair enough, I have the opposite experience where most people using dark UI’s where doing so for utility reasons not aesthetics. Outside of a brief fad of Matrix themed terminals which quickly died out.
Apart from the IBM 3279 color terminal, released in 1974, and literally hundreds of devices following (and maybe preceding) that.
There have been plenty of other color schemes that I think it's safe to say have been inspired by Solarized and this is very satisfying to see. Many of them have done a better job at thinking through the git structure of their projects :)
Perhaps so. I've attempted to find some other color scheme. The most significant color scheme change I was able to stomach during the last ten years was from Solarized Dark to Solarized Light. Thank you <3
As my eyes age I often use Solarized in higher contrast configuration, so I'm sensitive to this issue.
1) I don't use Solarized everywhere religiously. I use it a LOT, no surprise. Still my preferred color scheme in most editing, terminal, code situations. But I am happy to use other well designed colorschemes in various contexts (writing, task management apps, etc.). Even when Solarized is available, sometimes variety is what's called for.
2) Solarized was designed to enable the colors to be used in high contrast modes as well. As my eyes age I sometimes will apply the colorscheme in a higher contrast mode. This adaptability is sometimes overlooked but it is inherent and intentional to the design.
https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w...
Never looked back. Next best theme would have to be nordtheme.com
The keyword you're looking for is "sernik".
https://github.com/jan-warchol/przepisy-programisty
EDIT: pull requests with translations are welcome, but you'd have to speak Polish first, which takes us back to square one. Google translate is half-decent with this language though, so you might be able to run off of that.
I switched (in vim) to gruvbox [0] (better maintained "community" edition [1]), which also has a dark and a light version, which is a lot warmer.
0: https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox 1: https://github.com/gruvbox-community/gruvbox
thanks, hatsubishi, for pointing out the typo in the second link!
Personally, somehow I'm ok with looking at code and some notes in light-gray-on-black, but reading paragraphs of text is immediately off-putting. The proliferation of ‘dark theme’ sites is not working out for me.
Probably relevant with astigmatism, since tighter focus should at least somewhat alleviate the shifty out-of-place edges (hopefully).
After ditching VS Code in favor of Alacritty/Tmux/NeoVim I tried a few themes, really liked Nord but ended up sticking with the cozy Gruvbox.
So I’m stuck writing code all day long with light schemes.
In this context, Solarized is a gift and I’m grateful for it. I just cannot name another light color scheme you could stare at all day long without burning your eyes.
1: https://www.allaboutvision.com/digital-eye-strain/is-dark-mo...
Hi Dark Themers, in an earlier life I worked in optics, designing holographic cameras for bubble chamber physics, so I know a little about focussing systems and depth of field. The iris in the eye expands or contracts to allow or restrict the amount of light entering the eye, attempting to maintain a constant luminosity on the retina so that either not too little, or not too much light falls on the cones and rods in the retina. When the iris is dilated (open) the eye allows as much light as possible into it. You can visualize the light from a point (say a pixel) that reaches the iris as a cone. The lens in the eye focuses this expanding cone back into a contracting one that comes to a point on the retina corresponding to the position of the pixel "out there on the screen".
Focusing is achieved by a muscle around the eye's flexible lens, the cillary muscle, which squeezes the lens into a more spherical shape to cause rays entering the eye to bend more, brings no objects closer to the eye into focus, or by the cillary muscle relaxing, allowing the lens to stretch back to a flatter shape, to bend rays less, bringing objects further away into focus. In old age shortsightedness is caused by the lens loosing its elasticity and remaining squeezed, and longsightedness by it losing flexibility and the cillary muscle losing strength so that the lens cannot be squeezed as much. By the time we hit our 40's many of us will suffer one of these two extremes and have to wear glasses either for reading or for driving or, in my case, for both.
Getting back to the cone of rays from a pixel that the iris and lens conspire to bring to a point on the retina, if there is a lot of light incident on the eye and the iris is undilated then this cone is much slimmer. The result of these differing cones on focus is called depth of field. When the cone is "fat" depth of field is reduced; only pixels in the same plane (actually a spherical surface, not a plane, because the retina is spherical; film cameras have planar light receptors; the eye and camera obscures etc have spherical light receptors) will be in focus; others out of the plane will produce a diffuse circle on the retina. When the cone is "slim" (because more light is incident on the eye) depth of field is increased because the size of the out of focus diffuse circle is smaller. Consequently, when there is less light falling on the eye, depth of field is reduced; the cones are fatter and as the eye roams the cillary muscle must work to alter the curvature of the lens to keep things in focus.
The implication for the dark theme is that, while it appears to have better contrast (it does not; but more on that below), the real effect is that it causes the eye to do more work than a light theme because the amount of light entering the eye is less. So both in the short term and especially over the long term the dark theme, relative to the light theme, will tire your collate muscle and cause your lens to stiffen or squish sooner. Why then, if what I'm saying is true, did all those World War Two military aircraft use white letters on a black background? My lotus europa is the same. The disc of the instrument is illuminated by a lamp so one can see it at night, and were the panel painted white then, for the same contrast, much more light would hit the eye that for white letters on a black background and the pilot's (or driver's) night vision would be impaired as the iris would contract.
I don't want to fear monger, but I do want to suggest that it is healthier and less wearing on the eyes to use light themes.
Eliot
I'm 49 and can literally watch (pun intended) how my capability to focus in the near field gets worse and worse. I've been using dark themes in the terminal for 25 years and for a couple of years tried to use dark mode also in other software as much as possible.
After reading this I really wonder if I did myself a disservice and if I shouldn't change to light mode again.
Does anyone know of more sources on this topic? And also if the effect can be reversed or at least slowed with going back to light again?
EDIT: This[1] answer on Stackexchange has some funded details.
Can’t help but feel that it is fear mongering, though. This can’t be that difficult to research. Where is the hard evidence to back this up? Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole looking for anything scientific that suggests what you’re saying, and I find nothing that implies long term damage. The quoted post is drawing a lot of assumptions.
I've had that, too, especially when Windows 10 came out, and I was forced to use it. The full-on white, on a high-contrast monitor, was a literally painful experience.
However, as others, I much prefer having the same lightness everywhere. I hate switching from a dark background terminal / editor to a light background webpage, so I set out to mitigate this somehow.
So, I've started using off-white backgrounds when I use light mode. Solarized is a bit too orange for my taste, but many other schemes are available. I, personally, use Base16 Equilibrium (both light and dark).
I use Stylus to apply a dark skin to some sites, like HN, and sometimes, I get a flash of brightness which is very jarring in the dark.
I think "dark mode" can make this worse, as it often 'pops' best with a very high brightness, which is even more blinding when running a non-dark mode app.
But I think the reason for setting the monitors to a high brightness, which I've sometimes done at work, is the awful quality of the panels. Setting them brighter makes colors pop, as you say, even in light mode.
My work laptop is one such offender, with darker hues basically indistinguishable at low brightness. However, the screen is shitty all the way, and max brightness isn't all that bright...
Isn't the fact you get migraines the issue to solve, rather than the color scheme?
Most monitors these days are way too bright, especially for the amount of ambient light coming into the room. I try to get a bunch of light into my office and it is still barely close enough for this monitor. Combine that with displays getting bigger and bigger and it becomes more understandable how it can aggravate these conditions.
Does that last part necessarily follow? Maybe doing more work is a good thing?
Or do you have a source to back that up?
Even since I learned to turn down my monitor brightness so that white on my monitor is about the same brightness as a white piece of paper in the room, I have been very fond of Prot's Modus Operandi (https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes).
So I use light mode now all the time. That said, dark mode will always look cooler.
I tend to use monochrome on dark backgrounds, I prefer white on blue to the usual light grey on black.
During the day, I like the rather colorful light Emacs leuven theme: https://github.com/fniessen/emacs-leuven-theme.
For some reason, I find the default acme editor very nice to use, from a legibility and information density POV.
Don't feel stuck! I think the world has gone a bit mad chasing "dark mode" for text everywhere. This must be highly personal, but light themes really reduce the fatigue on my eyes, and I've always found them preferable too. Maybe it's really the dark mode people who are stuck?
If you like solarized light, you might want to try gruvbox light [0], which I find even easier on the eyes.
I even thought that maybe I had to make everything light themed so there is no contrast between pages /apps but it doesn't help.
This is purely a personal observation of how my eyes work.
I've struggled to find a perfect set of color themes my entire life, at least, that's what now it feels like. And at some point I realized, the smaller the palette, the fewer color variations there are, lesser the strain on the eye. Also, staring for a long time at the same - light or dark (it doesn't matter) color theme makes me feel tired.
In the end, I settled on two different [customized] themes, based on base-16 color themes. My main tool, my editor of choice is Emacs. I spent most of my time in it. I'm typing this comment in Emacs, while I have HN opened in the adjacent window (still in Emacs). I use circadian.el, which allows me to set my themes based on the time of day. They switch automatically and I love that.
Maybe try different color themes based on the light source, your mood, time of the day, place, etc.?
Solarized is gone? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776581 - Aug 2018 (3 comments)
The Man Behind ‘Solarized,’ the Most Important Color Scheme in Computer History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10525589 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)
Solarized on The Changelog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3776077 - March 2012 (4 comments)
Solarized color theme for Emacs 24 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3308271 - Dec 2011 (11 comments)
Solarized - Color scheme for vim, mutt, terminal emulators - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393976 - March 2011 (154 comments)
I also have glare coming through a window at work that is in a new office and so there's no window blinds yet. The solarized light theme helps me continue to be able to see what's on my screen no matter what's happening and I appreciate that.
I'll switch back to a dark theme if I need to when I'm on a long trip and it's at night and I'm in the car so I don't disturb the driver with my screen.
I like that I can switch back and forth with using the same theme and that the light theme is so well thought out.
What's Minimalist?
Whenever I saw anyone attempting to have everything dark, half the things looked awful, the dark theme was not even an afterthought...
Stylus is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
You can find themes to suit you here: https://uso.kkx.one/browse/styles?search=Hackernews (or search for any other site you might want to alter)
> Whenever I saw anyone attempting to have everything dark, half the things looked awful, the dark theme was not even an afterthought...
That's exactly why you pretty much need an extension like Stylus or Minimalist to get proper themes made by people who cares what the sites end up looking like.
https://github.com/nealmckee/penumbra
> »Penumbra is a mathematically balanced colour scheme constructed in a perceptually uniform colour space with base colours inspired by the shades of colour occurring in nature due to the light of the sun and the sky. It cleanly separates the perceptual properties of colours while optimally utilizing the available colour space of typical displays.«
It was mentioned here ~3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348461
The nasty details in color space is basically that it is a non-Euclidean metric (when considering perceptual uniformity). There are empirical formula describing a metric. And one can probably numerically optimize in that metric. But it doesn't seem to do something like that (I skimmed through only.)
My definition of mathematically balance would be for the palette (which is N points in the colorspace) to have a certain relationship according to the metric. One example relationship would be for them to be for all nearest neighbors sharing the same distance (which might not be possible.) The one I have in mind is for a sub-set of them forming this relationship in a potentially tilted plane, and probably have 2 such planes with a certain distance apart. The symmetry in the metric probably allows you to find 2 such planes that is equidistance with the center which can then have nicer properties about the relationships between points on opposite planes.
All these are easy if the metric is Euclidean, which is approximately true with some colorspace. It would be much more complicated if the empirical metric is taken into account.
Bottom line is I expect them to define what mathematical balanced means and there seems none.
Doing the balancing in Oklab specifically addresses your point about perception in our eyes.
It would be useful with a public repository with [e.g.] solarized theme for “all” applications, the same way Dracula Theme has.
I think what the creator is doing is outsourcing the maintenance of each individual app to a maintainer that cares; the themes folder contains pointers to other repos:
https://github.com/dracula/dracula-theme/tree/master/themes
I think that is a good idea.
This could be used to "reverse-engineer a generic platform" relatively easily:
1: Fork Dracula and its themes
3: For each color in Dracula.Palette
4: Find and replace color.hex by color.refjex on themes
5: Find and replace "color.r,color.g,color.b" by color.refrgb on themes
6: Find and replace "color.h,color.s,color.l" by color.refhsl on themes
Of course steps 4,5 and 6 are more complex than 3 lines. One will have to come up with a way to filter out spaces, commas and other things. I expect a lot of the apps out there to expect hex numbers though.
One Dark is more like what I want.
But even that's not perfect. The color for comments (as with many dark themes) is too dim. Comments shouldn't stand out, but they should also be easy to read when needed. I think that Visual Studio's dark color scheme actually does great there. The green comments separate themselves well from the code, don't draw too much attention to themselves, and they're still clear when you're trying to read them.
Justification: A comment that exists should only exist if it is important, if it is helpful documentation for a function or for some specific code section. If that's the case then a comment should absolutely be the first thing you see, thus it should stand out.
That sound a bit like I would advocate to comment less, but that hasn't been the effect of that change. To the contrary, I'd say it was a factor in my placing more (in my eyes important) comments in code bases than many other developers I work with.
It's rather thought out colour scheme and kudos for the success, but contrast is way too low. My eyes got tired very fast while trying to use solarized scheme.
I've stuck with `Tomorrow Night Bright` for quite some time now as I enjoy the scheme and the contrastiness of it, though I tweaked it that the text is almost pure white and background is almost pure black.
Personally, astigmatism causes halation[1] of the text with dark modes. The only time I find them tolerable or needed is when I'm in a very dark room.
In the day, when I do most of my work, I am in a lit room or outside and I am looking at physical documents, desktop environments, and web pages that are all light-colored. I would feel my eyes and brain churning every time I'd have to re-focus on a dark-themed window in this context, so it only makes sense to have my code/text light-colored as well.
`~/Library/Containers/com.barebones.bbedit/Data/Library/Application\ Support/BBEdit/Color\ Schemes`.
(This can be simply navigated to from within BBEdit via the "BBEdit" menu > "Folders" > "Color Shemes". This will open the folder in the Finder, just copy the `*.bbColorScheme` files there.)
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions!
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/e814989a4842426cbafd88f51...
And the corresponding dunkel-theme: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cnakazaw...
I have a bunch of set-up tips on how to use these across all tools here: https://cpojer.net/posts/the-perfect-development-environment
Flatwhite (available for emacs as doom-flatwhite) https://github.com/biletskyy/flatwhite-syntax
gruvbox-light
Nüshu https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wheredoe...
These are the soft light themes I enjoyed after Solarized Light.
I also appreciate the work he went into to set the color scheme up. I feel the same spirit with the Modus themes[1] for emacs
Haven’t used it lately; need to check if it’s been updated for truecolor terminal emulators like Kitty or WezTerm.
Big fan of Tokyo Night for Neovim these days: https://github.com/folke/tokyonight.nvim
Funnily enough, I lived next to Ethan for a few years in Seattle, and was not a solarized user prior to meeting him. Thanks Ethan!
care to share?
That might just be some kind of fatigue because I've experienced the opposite recently!
I've been a happy user of Visual Studio Code's default dark theme for a few years, and one day I snapped and just couldn't stand looking at it anymore. I switched to Solarized Light (yeah) and I find it extremely refreshing. I just had to tweak the color for "deleted block" in the scrollbar which was way too close to the "compilation error" color.
I guess some people just need change sometimes!
> Black text on white from a computer display is akin to reading a book in direct sunlight and tires the eye.
No it doesn't. I don't know where that claim comes from. In sunlight reading is reduced through glare.
Personally his red on black makes those words unreadable. I really doubt his claims of testing it. But good luck to those who it does work for.
Which leads me to the following question: has anybody migrated from dark themes to light themes after years of use? I've always had my terminal and my editor dark, but my browser light. I have a hard time reading long text like prose or forums in dark mode. So that makes me wonder if my code and terminal could also be better in light themes and I just have to struggle to get rid of my dark theme habit.
Nowadays I use nord everywhere but when I first followed the oh-my-zsh + iterm2 tutorials for OSX, I definitely used Solarized for a good 6 months.
Monokai was Sublime’s default but I urge folks to specifically look at the Pro version here. https://monokai.pro/
https://github.com/enkia/tokyo-night-vscode-theme#other-port...
Even the open source and professional theme Dracula seem to rely on manual porting:
If someone is looking for soft and easy to read theme I always suggest to try one of Ayu ones (they have 3 + 3 bordered)