
The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination - occamschainsaw
https://www.wired.com/story/very-mathematical-history-perfect-color-combination/
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ericsoderstrom
For anyone who is very particular about their color schemes: I'd recommend
checking out the base16 project [1]. It's a collection of well-maintained
color schemes (including solarized) for basically every text editor and
terminal emulator. It makes switching between different schemes very easy, and
includes tools for keeping your editor colors in sync with your terminal.

[1]:
[http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/](http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/)

~~~
java-man
I noticed it's more difficult to create a good light theme. The colors appear
vibrant on a dark background, but things are very different on a white
background: in order to have high contract text one needs to use dark colors
of different colors, and it gets harder to tell the difference.

Do you know any good colors specifically for light themes?

Solarized family is too dark (for me, at least).

~~~
1996
Agreed, but change the background to something lighter and solarized-light is
not so bad.

Bonus: it's widely supported, so you only change one color

My suggestion is a light yellowish grey: BackgroundColour=236,231,225

Bonus of using light themes instead of dark themes: you can invert your colors
at night. It is easy on your eyes, and the browser and the rest of the system
also follow suit.

I recommanad to use NegativeScreen + a red matrix so everything is in shade of
red.

~~~
java-man
That's the thing: I don't want to have dim background. In fact, I would rather
prefer a bight background.

The main reason that could be due to the fact that a bright background forces
the pupil to narrow, making the text sharper for older people.

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orev
> neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead
> channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer

Oh my god. Really?! You have to be kidding me. This phrase means: the color of
static - gray and moving with flecks of random color. It has _always_ meant
this and always will. It’s inexcusable that a Wired writer doesn’t know this.

Even TVs that show the blue screen still show static for a second before the
blue kicks in. I simply don’t believe that anyone really doesn’t know what
static looks like, and this blue sky myth is just some kind of in-joke.

~~~
klint
Author of the article here. I never interpreted that opening line as referring
to static, but to gray of a blank television screen. Otherwise why not write
"the color of television static?"

~~~
cannam
At the time he was writing, TVs didn't know how to blank out between channels.
They just broadcast the noise. Blank television screens (when the TV was on)
hadn't been invented yet.

(edit: maybe that's not true, perhaps in 1984 TVs with plain blue between the
channels did just about exist? I don't know, in the 80s I only had access to
the sort of black-and-white TV that meant his image came across to me exactly
the way he apparently intended it)

~~~
klint
Hm, maybe but that's not what I had in mind. I was thinking of the way an old
Magnavox looks when it's not displaying anything, like when you've just
switched it off but it's still glowing slightly. My recollection, which could
be incorrect (I was quite young in the early 80s), is that it also looked this
way if you switched to a cable channel that didn't exist (I realize in this
case it's not technically "tuned" to a channel). Anyway, that deep but
luminous gray is what the opening line of Neuromancer has always invoked for
me, and what the background of Solarized Dark looks like to me as well.

As another commenter pointed out, Gibson did mean static, so I suppose he must
have been thinking of a much lighter gray, I guess illuminated by the Chiba
city lights.

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weinzierl
This is about the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. This is the
color scheme I use and love and am grateful to Ethan that he made it. That
being said, "The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination" is a
stretch - a big stretch. For one thing, going by Ethan's own description of
the selection process, there was not much math involved:

 _Schoonover talks a lot about the mathematical nature of his color
selections, but he picked the starting colors, a blue and a yellow, for very
personal reasons. The blue reminds him of his long standing thalassophobia,
the fear of very deep water. And though he says he doesn 't otherwise
experience synesthesia—such as hearing colors or tasting words—the yellow
invokes tastes and smells he associates with his childhood. "My parents are
artists, I'm comfortable picking things for obscure reasons," he says._

For another thing, even if it was strictly based on a color circle, that
wouldn't make it more "mathematical". The color circle of current fashion
isn't much more than a historical accident and besides the basic order of the
main colors there isn't much science behind it.

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baking
I started programming on VT-100s, moved to the IBM monochome (green) and then
amber screens (over-hyped in my opinion.) Younger guys and their EVGA monitors
would program in yellow on magenta which I couldn't stand. But nothing is as
bad for readability to my 60 year old eyes as all forms of gray on gray.
Anyone trying to use a historical argument for this color scheme seems
misguided to me.

~~~
sureaboutthis
Same here. I do not understand the desire of these candy colors and what
purpose they serve. Purportedly, it helps people find function or variable
names but, in reality, it's just a blur of colors, each of which can mean
multiple things.

Give me white on black any day. I do like bold or gray on certain properties
but only if it can be consistent and it's rarely consistent.

~~~
kqr
I agree so much. I always have to create my own colour scheme for this reason.
I want almost everything to be white on black, or black on white, and then I
have like three exceptions to that:

\- source code comments are a slightly more dim gray and literal strings are a
slightly more dim green, because they're characters that can look like code,
but generally have no semantic meaning to the program; \- structural keywords
are an orangeish-brown to highlight the syntactical structure of the code; and
\- types belong to a different world than the syntax tree, so they are a
contrasting blue.

That's it. I don't want any more than that.

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saagarjha
> "When Apple introduced dark mode for MacOS, I thought it was cool," says
> Bir, the Virginia programmer and artist. "But I wish it was Solarized."

I’m not sure I understand what this means. Do they want UI elements to be
Solarized?

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techbio
1\. Read the article, entertain the premise.

2\. Install solarized from github on IntelliJ

3\. Realize the editor frame and the rest of the UI don't match.

4\. Back out install.

5\. Finally, conclude that I actually do not want all editors I use to have
the same color scheme; the differences in appearance serve to cue my mind that
each editor operates differently, does things in different ways, and I am
already equipped with sufficient cognitive dissonance not to add another
layer.

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espeed
Blue and Green for the Web in 1999!

[https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-
usability/](https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/)

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monokai_nl
I like the idea of symmetry of Solarized. I know how much work goes into
creating a balanced color scheme. One thing that’s super hard is to match the
same perceived level of brightness across different hues, while also being
aesthetically pleasing. To balance that out is a lot of work but ultimately
leads to a more harmonious picture that’s easy to read. I gave it my best shot
for [https://www.monokai.pro](https://www.monokai.pro)

