It is much healthier and less weary on the eyes to use the high contrast feature in Windows from (XP up, I believe), by pressing shift+alt+print screen (and space bar.)

One can spend much more time reading on the screen.

Another feature I use a lot is zooming with ctrl++ in FoxIt or Adobe PDF reader, and ctrl+up on the mouse wheel in Mozilla Firefox(and Chrome), some web designers tend to use very small fonts where they shouldn't(let alone blogs, which are designed to be thinned out to leave space for advertising at the sidebars.)

If that doesn't work, I use the excellent gratis ZoomIt tool, to zoom in sections that are otherwise not available through the aforementioned tools.

I tend to distance myself from the computer monitors at least one meter to avoid eye strain and the low but permanent radiation.

I think it depends on peoples vision. In the past year I have had far more problems with the computer as I am long-sighted and as I get older my eyes are starting to get strained by long hours at the screen. But it's really particular what causes strain and what doesn't.

I occasionally play a roguelike called 'Brogue' and that game causes my eyes to get sore. It's light on dark. And yet, i use the dark theme in Visual Studio and I have far less problems with that, almost none, and yet i can have long hours programming. While full-color games don't really cause problems for me at all. I think it has a lot to do with focus, and how my eyes have to move around, and contrast as well. But I don't think there is a fixed formula for understanding eye strain. It's particular to your eyes I think and what tasks you are doing.

I remember when I played first person shooters I suffered from nausea. Spyro the Dragon and games that require a lot of manual camera manipulation also causes the same effect.

I blogged about how to avoid eye strain with simple exercises every 2 hours.

There seems to be a lot to do in life, and maintaining pauses without diminishing productivity is achievable by, for example, having a snack or running in the neighbourhood where one is constrained to focus farther away.

Thanks to make me realize my windows is bugged, as I cant return from the high contrast unless I change the theme myself manually

._.

When I press the keys again, it makes the sound of returning to normal but it doesnt do anything, than if I press again it shows the popup for turning on again. That shit just turns on. Dx

It is much healthier and less weary on the eyes to use the high contrast feature in Windows from (XP up, I believe), by pressing shift+alt+print screen (and space bar.)

I knew the theme existed (which I've never used), but I never knew there was a shortcut for it.

The shortcut is shift+alt then click printscreen (must be LEFT shift and LEFT alt), at least on my system (Win7). Clicking spacebar seems unneccesary.

I'll have to see if it helps me with eye strain.

[Edit:] Apparently the Chrome developers thought of everything. When in Google Chrome, if Window's high-contrast is on, Google Chrome detects it and pops up its own message:


Unfortunately the Google Chrome extension loads the webpages before applying the filter, so you get flashes of white webpages before they convert to dark.

Another feature I use a lot is zooming with ctrl++ in FoxIt or Adobe PDF reader, and ctrl+up on the mouse wheel in Mozilla Firefox(and Chrome)

I use that in the IDE I use (QtCreator) to occasionally zoom-out on the source code (Ctrl+Mouse-wheel). I also implemented it in the 2D tilemap editor I'm working on, so I can zoom out while editing maps to see the bigger-picture or place tiles over a wider area.

I would use the dark windows themes, but there's too many apps that either ignore the OS colour schemes, or worse, partially use them which results in stuff like dark blue text on black backgrounds...
Also, I find dark colour schemes with low contrast to be the easiest on they eyes -- I find high contrast white on black to be even fired than black on white.

I generally just use the default themes. I might change the wallpaper, and on Windows 7 I'll pick the record player as my user account pic, but that's about the maximum of what I do. In programs where themes are on offer it's the same, with the exception of Office 2013 where I must switch to dark grey in order to maintain my sanity (it's too difficult for me to differentiate between the various on-screen elements otherwise).

Main reason why is that I spend my working life hopping between so many different PCs and servers that if I needed to spend half an hour or whatever getting things set up before I could use it, I'd get nothing else done. In those kind of circuumstances you tend to get used to the default themes pretty quick.