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Solarized

ethanschoonover.com

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Re: Solarized

#161

Post by adamwk »

Adaptive wrote: post #146
teucris wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much for Solarized. Really changed the way I think about syntax highlighting and UI! Have you run common color/font configurations from Solarized through WCAG’s contrast checking tools? As I create more and more UIs I’ve become increasingly aware of contrast for accessibility and I was wondering what your thoughts were in this regard.

I didn't run Solarized through WCAG when designing it (I don't believe that was around when I was designing it, though I could be wrong) but I did design it to enable high contrast use (this is mentioned on the site but sometimes overlooked in implementations). The highest contrast base tones as background / foreground colors (base03+base3) do pass with a 13.91:1 ratio. In "low contrast" mode, Solarized passes all bu…

Just curious, what are your favorite not-solarized color schemes?

Re: Solarized

#162

Post by yojo »

cstross wrote: post #157
yojo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to become a writer, you should definitely have a financial cushion. Replicating Stross’s success will almost certainly take years of minimally paid hard work, plus a fair bit of luck. Writing is a hard, hard business. Unless you can write proficiently in the romance genre. There’s gold in them hills.

I wrote my first novel-shaped object when I was 15. 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…

Fair point, it’s all hard. I intended to call out romance as a (long shot) potential source of overnight success. Reading the various self-publishing forums, any post that starts with “I earned six figures on my first book” ends with “and it’s a romance.”

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.

Re: Solarized

#163

Post by slowmovintarget »

teh_klev wrote: post #88
29athrowaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you used Borland C++, DBase, Lotus 123, WordStar and others... or used a monochromatic monitor (green, cyan or white on black), you used light text on a dark background. 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 importan…

> the larger portion of the people that started coding on a light text on dark background had already retired. We're not that old!

Yeah! (shakes cane)

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.

Re: Solarized

#164

Post by slowmovintarget »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #89
29athrowaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you used Borland C++, DBase, Lotus 123, WordStar and others... or used a monochromatic monitor (green, cyan or white on black), you used light text on a dark background. 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 importan…

I'll add WordPerfect v5.1 for DOS. White text on Blue background.

I used Word 1.0. Same.

Re: Solarized

#166

Post by KolenCh »

kseistrup wrote: post #92
KolenCh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems interesting. But the claim about being "mathematically balanced" is skeptical to me. It seems it does better than Solarized which claimed a similar but weaker statement. 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 doe…

I agree, the “mathematically balanced” is a peculiar sales pitch. Are our eyes “mathematically balanced”? If not, then the palette probably shouldn't be either.

What you said is about the subjective aspect. But what I'm saying is that it can be mathematically balanced, but what they are doing doesn't seem to be true.

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.

Re: Solarized

#167

Post by Emigre_ »

29athrowaway wrote: post #46
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

I credit Solarized with setting the baseline allowing proper "dark" themes to be more commonplace. I'm going out on a limb, but perhaps macOS' Dark Mode, or VSCode's dark mode, wouldn't exist without Solarized blazing that path. 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 re…

If you used Borland C++, DBase, Lotus 123, WordStar and others... or used a monochromatic monitor (green, cyan or white on black), you used light text on a dark background. 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 importan…

Memories!… QBasic was white over blue, and Turbo Pascal yellow over blue.

Re: Solarized

#168

Post by aikinai »

kseistrup wrote: post #92
KolenCh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems interesting. But the claim about being "mathematically balanced" is skeptical to me. It seems it does better than Solarized which claimed a similar but weaker statement. 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 doe…

I agree, the “mathematically balanced” is a peculiar sales pitch. Are our eyes “mathematically balanced”? If not, then the palette probably shouldn't be either.

The "mathematically balanced" description seems to be selling itself short actually. If you check the actual description, it says "By using the perceptually uniform colour space Oklab, I was able to achieve perceptually uniform hue differences between each of the accent colours, ensuring maximum differentiability between highlighted words. Constant chroma ensures none of them stand out from or recede into the page more than others."

Doing the balancing in Oklab specifically addresses your point about perception in our eyes.

Re: Solarized

#169

Post by aikinai »

kseistrup wrote: post #64

Anyone here using Penumbra? 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…

Thanks for suggesting this one; I missed it but it looks great. Trying it out now!

Re: Solarized

#170

Post by [deleted] »

aasasd wrote: post #127
xwowsersx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I regularly switch between light and dark mode. For me, dark feels more comfortable in the short-term, but I find that I can't use dark for an entire day. Anyways, I previously used solarized. It's very pleasant for a certain period of time, but like many color themes that I like, it doesn't actually "scale" in the sense that I can't use it for extended periods of time. Gruvbox, on the other hand, I can use for…

I heard that astigmatism is the reason some people find reading white-on-black intolerable: the edges shift from their proper places, look doubled, this kind of stuff. Idk if astigmatism-correcting glasses fix the problem, as I'm not that diligent with my prescriptions. 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…

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