Question

What are good colors to use for a terminal window (text and background) to minimize eye strain/damage? I feel like someone, maybe a design or medical professional, must have done research on this topic, but my search has only turned up results based on what people think is pretty.

I'm hesitant to ask on SU because I suspect there's no single perfect answer, but even general guidelines -- light on dark vs. dark on light, complementary color combinations -- would be helpful.

EDIT: I used to like light gray on black, myself, but my new work monitor leaves greenish and purplish tinges around the edges of the letters with gray on black. I suspect it's an LCD thing. That's what motivated the question, anyways.

Answer 1

A very good discussion at Stackoverflow:
White (Light) vs. Black (Dark) Backgrounds: Health Effects.
I hope it's helpful for you.

Answer 2

I recall reading, years (decades?) ago, that the amber on black color scheme of some old monochrome monitors was easier on the eyes than the green or white on black. The RGB values are 185, 128, 0.

Some say black on white is really the easiest on the eyes (it certainly works here), but it just doesn't seem to work in a command window.

Answer 3

Text on paper is dark text on light background, and it's the default in most modern (i.e. not retro) environments, so I prefer it. But it seems wrong to me that the brightest light my monitor can generate should be my background color; I think old web browsers with their default gray backgrounds were on to something, but went a bit too far, perhaps due to limited gradients available. I am currently using off-white (#dcdad5) for my backgrounds in terminals and text exitors, etc, and I never notice that it isn't 100% white except when side by side with a web page with a white background.

Answer 4

The default Ubuntu theme of Black on white works the best for me.

Add to it, (stocked) Monospace 10 font; and it has to be the best set up possible!

Answer 5

i like Blue/Cyan (Norton Commander style) or Black/Amber (the old Monochrome Graphics feel :)

Answer 6

I like to use Tango colors.

Answer 7

I prefer green on black. But a good 'invention' of mine is setting your root shell's colors to yellow on red; it's absolutely obnoxious, but that's good, if you're trying to force yourself to spend the absolute minimum amount of time as root. This way being lazy and doing everything as root is nearly impossible, as my eyes start to tear with that color scheme within 15 minutes.

Answer 8

OS X has/had quite a problem with their default color scheme, in that one of the blues was unreadable. As a result, a very beautiful theme was created, which you can find here:

http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/2

Ever since discovering it, I've liked it on Linux etc. as well.