5 ms·

I’ve always felt like the contrast was too low, feels harder to read

ziml77 4y ago
I have the same issue with Solarized. I need something with just a little more contrast. 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.
- onli 4y ago
  I think that comments should stand out and modified solarized accordingly in my editors. I made it a bright lightish green (in dark mode) in my main editor. If you haven't yet, I can only recommend to give that a try. 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.
bscphil 4y ago
Yeah, a good example of this is here - IMO the background color is just much too bright for the base text color to be so dark. You need a little contrast in the luminosity, even if you have perfect color vision. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altercation/solarized/master/img/screen-c-dark.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altercation/solarized/mast...
trymas 4y ago
I concur 100%. 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.
pneumic 4y ago
Way, way too low for me. I notice people who use it tend to be on the younger side and/or must have very good eyes. 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. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halation https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halation

I have the same issue with Solarized. I need something with just a little more contrast. 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.

onli 4y ago
I think that comments should stand out and modified solarized accordingly in my editors. I made it a bright lightish green (in dark mode) in my main editor. If you haven't yet, I can only recommend to give that a try. 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.

bscphil 4y ago

Yeah, a good example of this is here - IMO the background color is just much too bright for the base text color to be so dark. You need a little contrast in the luminosity, even if you have perfect color vision. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altercation/solarized/master/img/screen-c-dark.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altercation/solarized/mast...

trymas 4y ago

I concur 100%. 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.

pneumic 4y ago

Way, way too low for me. I notice people who use it tend to be on the younger side and/or must have very good eyes. 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. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halation https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halation