Light theme or dark theme?
Lights on or lights off?


Just curious.

Dark. Apparently it's bad for your eyes, but I feel like it's much more comfortable to read.

Personally I find decent resolution monitors with solid refresh rates while working in a room that is suitably lit and being sure to focus on things at different distances on a frequent basis has far more impact on eye strain than any colour combination.

Light colour scheme in most cases in a well lit room that doesn't have glare or reflections on the monitors, and at least two monitors at slightly different distances that I switch back and forth from several times a minute (Secondary monitor is set back slightly and off to the side, turning my head makes it about 9-12 inches difference in distance), and I look clear across the room at something high contrast and well lit a few times an hour.

Personally I find decent resolution monitors with solid refresh rates while working in a room that is suitably lit and being sure to focus on things at different distances on a frequent basis has far more impact on eye strain than any colour combination.

Light colour scheme in most cases in a well lit room that doesn't have glare or reflections on the monitors, and at least two monitors at slightly different distances that I switch back and forth from several times a minute (Secondary monitor is set back slightly and off to the side, turning my head makes it about 9-12 inches difference in distance), and I look clear across the room at something high contrast and well lit a few times an hour.

Have you had issues with eye stain in the past? If not, you are thinking about this shit too hard.

I actually prefer grey backgrounds, but I haven't found many good ones.

I actually prefer grey backgrounds, but I haven't found many good ones.

I'm with you there.

Medium grey (or really any other neutral colour) with light coloured text is my preference, but very few packages have a decent out-of-the-box configuration like that.

Have you had issues with eye stain in the past? If not, you are thinking about this shit too hard.

I have had issues with eye strain in the past, and find that not being a dick to my eyeballs by giving them comfortable conditions has eliminated the problem.

And you really find that "Keep light levels fairly even and let the muscles in your eyes stretch a bit every now and then (Conditions the human eye happened to evolve for)" is thinking too much about it? Takes less time to think about it than it did to write these posts...

For me it depends on the application, which seems pretty weird now that I think about it.

Sublime Text -> Monokai dark

Visual Studio -> Default light

Gonna jump on the grey background train. Though I like it closer to black than white. I've been using Sublime Text alot now, for schoolwork were we mostly write small programs, and the default background color there is really nice.
After I've gone over to dark themes though, I find it horrible to look at light themes now..
Completely black background is too hard on me, atleast with white text.

..in Powershell I have black bg with full green text. Matrix-style :)

Have you had issues with eye stain in the past? If not, you are thinking about this shit too hard.

Many years ago I was playing a LOT of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. Multi-hour long sessions of such focus that I didn't blink at all during matches and rarely blinked outside matches (and really only spent the 10-20 seconds it took to jump into the next match). Afterwards, I struggled to focus on anything that wasn't 24" away from me for a minute or two.

I was still young, so it wasn't strain so much, just the eye muscles not wanting to move after spending such a long period of time nearly completely stationary.