The black text on white background always seemed to cause me eye strain. On the other hand, the white-on-black or green-on-black seem too intense (too high-contrast) after a while, and made switching to a browser with its white background (yes, I’ve tried out the “high contrast” extension in chrome, it screws up colors too much for my taste) a jarring experience.
Then I came across Solarized (yes, late to the party, but that’s ok), and now I’ve enabled it across everything I use — which in my case happens to be a a couple of environments — OSX (terminal, emacs) and Linux (terminal(s), emacs). Here’s what I did for each:
Emacs
Run M-x package-install (you might have to run M-x list-packages to refresh the list), and select solarized-theme. This assumes you have the MELPA package archive configured. If not, add this line:
(setq package-archive (("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")))
Once the package is installed, add the following to your .emacs:
(load-theme 'solarized-dark t)
Gnome terminal
Run the following:
wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized/master/dircolors.ansi-dark mv dircolors.ansi-dark .dircolors git clone https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.git cd gnome-terminal-colors-solarized ./set_dark.sh
Guake
Run the following:
git clone https://github.com/coolwanglu/guake-colors-solarized.git cd guake-colors-solarized ./set_dark.sh
iTerm
Download this zip file, then from the iTerm Preferences, select “Profiles -> Color -> Load Preset”, and select the theme from the solarized directory in the unzipped contents, then select the imported theme.
That’s it! Have a happy solarized rest-of-your-life !
