Text Color Combinations and Eye Strain? 27
jalewis asks: "I was staring at the screen and the white background started to pulsate. It made me wonder if maybe my Eterm color choices are bad for my eyes. Is there a combo that put the least amount of strain on your eyes?" I can understand this. I remember back when those monochrome (yes, monochrome! I'm dating myself again) monitors came in terrible shades of red or green. I really appreciated CGA cards with their better handling of text colors when I first started working on PCs, as for general text, I'm still partial to greyish-white text on dark backgrounds. What foreground/background text colors work best for you?
Re:I have heard.... (Score:4, Interesting)
To this end, if memory serves it was Jerry Pournelle, suggested to MS that they include an option in office that didn't involve a black-on-white display, so there is a little checkbox that lets you have a blue background and white text hidden away in the prefs
My understanding was that the white on blue text in Word was a ``compatibility option'' so people who were forced to stop using WordPerfect could feel slightly more at home.
ObOnTopic: I generally use black text on a light yellow background. That's closer to ink on paper without being quite so glarey.
My partner was happy for years with her monochrome NeXT. Somehow the addition of color makes everything a lot more dodgy.
Best for me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I set all my xterms to green on black. It makes me look like an old-schooler at work, which gets annoying after the twentieth person points out that I'm using $20k worth of equipment to look like something from 1980, but I digress.
My goal was to first get rid of white backgrounds -- the refresh rate on my monitor at work was too low for my comfort, and white flashed. Black became my default. Next, for a foreground color. One would think that shelling out that much dough for a high powered UNIX workstation, they'd toss in a higher quality monitor, but the colors diverged on the periphery and there weren't enough controls to make them converge on all corners simultanously. So, my goal became to find a color that could be activated by one color gun alone -- blue, red or green. Blue appeared too dim (the human eye is least sensitive to blue, most to yellow), red was hard to look at for much time at all, and green was something I could stare into for 10-12 hours a day and not get a headache. So, for me, all my text windows became green on black, my headaches went away, and my job satisfaction soared. The downside was that my coworkers started to ask me UNIX questions as if I was tech support (I have the deepest respect for tech support, but since my job was as a circuit designer).