plain

A simple, minimalistic, an easy-on-the-eyes coding color scheme.

The Story

I was in search for a

• high-contrast, while easy on the eyes;
• minimalistic, while having adequate details;
• specifically designed for those who have considerable astigmatism and amblyopia…

color scheme for a long time.

Not finding a perfect fit for my needs, I decided to create one from scratch.

I have been using this scheme for a long time, in 8-10 hour coding sessions, daytime and nighttime; and my eyes more relaxed than ever!

When astigmatism is combined with ambylopia (1% of the general population on average), no matter what kind of corrective lens you use; when you code for long hours, your eyes lose their ability to focus, and you start to see “halos” around text, accompanied by headaches and eye fatigue.

Of course the ideal solution is to…

• Use a decent monitor;
• Not to forget to BLINK (that’s really important!);
• And get away from the darn monitor every hour and relax your eyes by focusing objects that are far away (like a mountain, or the horizon)

If you say “Ain’t nobody have time fo dat!”, read on…

If you have astigmatism, ambylopia, and a few other eye disorders combined, then good old solutions like Solarized, will not work so well, since they don’t have enough contrast.

On the other hand, a really high-contrast theme can equally be tiresome to your eye.

In deed, contrast is a double-edged sword:

• The higher the contrast, the more readable the color scheme is,
• And the lower the contrast the less tiring the color scheme will be to the eyes.

And the perfect sweet spot depends from person to person; and also it depends on the overall lighting conditions of the coding environment.

Plain color scheme has high enough contrast to make is pleasing to the eye; and low enough contrast to make it less tiresome. And since it is a dark-on-light scheme, it’s a really nice fit for those who have astigmatism.

Currently I have only have a vim GUI scheme (because I use vim all the time, and it is the best editor in the known universe).

Feel free to fork plain, add variations, and/or support for your favorite development environment.