3 ms·

Why does she hate colours so much?

TheNewAndy 3y ago
I am not the author, but I imagine that it could have started out as just a preference, but turned into great hatred as they kept on being introduced in more and more places. I don't mind colour, but really dislike incorrect colouring (not enough to any effort to do anything about it). Or maybe she really likes colour, but likes to use it very sparingly so it highlights things more effectively. I think there can be plenty of reasons, and I would be unsurprised if her reasons are ones that I guessed
srhtftw 3y ago
Some of us prefer tools which work best without them. Allow me to repeat my plea for CLI developers to take a little time to read https://no-color.org https://no-color.org and ensure their programs honor things like NO_COLOR, npm config set color false, TERM=dumb, INSIDE_EMACS etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017940
munch117 3y ago
Colours interfere with scannability. It forces you to deal with text one colour region at a time, making it harder to take in the whole thing at once. Scanning is a skill you acquire with age. As you get older, and you more and more replace word-by-word reading with full-page scanning, colour becomes less attractive. Less attractive doesn't mean worthless. Colour just needs to carry its weight, by providing enough relevant information to compensate for breaking up scanning flow. So used sparingly, colours can be good. It's just that no one seems to use colours sparingly. You see things like giving ".gz" (and other compressed) files a different colour. I have no need for that, .gz is just one among a thousand file extensions that I know, I can read the file extension myself thank you very much. Even if I had a great need for recognising compressed files, I couldn't rely on colours for that: Colouring is too inconsistent between applications, whereas scanning text and spotting the .gz extension carries over to almost anything.
- segfaltnh 3y ago
  This all sounds fascinating. Got any links on scanning and age w.r.t. color?
  - munch117 3y ago
    No, it's mostly based on personal experience. I was looking at how my younger colleagues were organising their screens, with IDE tool windows taking up most of it, and leaving no more than about a quarter of the screen to the source code editor, and comparing it to my own workspace, where the source code takes up most of the screen. And it struck me that 25 years ago my workspace looked more like theirs today than mine today. The scanning bit is the explanation I came up with. Wrt. colour, there's the concept of alarm colours in cognitive psychology. That, at least, should be DDG'able. It's the observation that certain colours, mainly red but also yellow, pull at your attention. This is a hardwired part of human cognition. If there are alarm colours present, then it becomes harder to read the rest of the text, because the alarm colour keeps trying to pull you in.

I am not the author, but I imagine that it could have started out as just a preference, but turned into great hatred as they kept on being introduced in more and more places. I don't mind colour, but really dislike incorrect colouring (not enough to any effort to do anything about it). Or maybe she really likes colour, but likes to use it very sparingly so it highlights things more effectively. I think there can be plenty of reasons, and I would be unsurprised if her reasons are ones that I guessed

srhtftw 3y ago

Some of us prefer tools which work best without them. Allow me to repeat my plea for CLI developers to take a little time to read https://no-color.org https://no-color.org and ensure their programs honor things like NO_COLOR, npm config set color false, TERM=dumb, INSIDE_EMACS etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35017940

munch117 3y ago

Colours interfere with scannability. It forces you to deal with text one colour region at a time, making it harder to take in the whole thing at once. Scanning is a skill you acquire with age. As you get older, and you more and more replace word-by-word reading with full-page scanning, colour becomes less attractive. Less attractive doesn't mean worthless. Colour just needs to carry its weight, by providing enough relevant information to compensate for breaking up scanning flow. So used sparingly, colours can be good. It's just that no one seems to use colours sparingly. You see things like giving ".gz" (and other compressed) files a different colour. I have no need for that, .gz is just one among a thousand file extensions that I know, I can read the file extension myself thank you very much. Even if I had a great need for recognising compressed files, I couldn't rely on colours for that: Colouring is too inconsistent between applications, whereas scanning text and spotting the .gz extension carries over to almost anything.

segfaltnh 3y ago
This all sounds fascinating. Got any links on scanning and age w.r.t. color?
- munch117 3y ago
  No, it's mostly based on personal experience. I was looking at how my younger colleagues were organising their screens, with IDE tool windows taking up most of it, and leaving no more than about a quarter of the screen to the source code editor, and comparing it to my own workspace, where the source code takes up most of the screen. And it struck me that 25 years ago my workspace looked more like theirs today than mine today. The scanning bit is the explanation I came up with. Wrt. colour, there's the concept of alarm colours in cognitive psychology. That, at least, should be DDG'able. It's the observation that certain colours, mainly red but also yellow, pull at your attention. This is a hardwired part of human cognition. If there are alarm colours present, then it becomes harder to read the rest of the text, because the alarm colour keeps trying to pull you in.