![]() ![]() "I didn't trust myself to come up with a palette that was balanced and looked good both in a dark and light medium," he says. ![]() Bir likes Solarized so much he uses it as the color scheme for his computer-generated art. "If I bring up a terminal window that doesn't have Solarized, I feel out of place I don't feel at home," says Zachery Bir, a Richmond, Virginia, programmer and artist who has been using Solarized since shortly after it was released in 2011. Microsoft even bundled it with its popular code editor VS Code. It’s available for every major code editor and many other programming tools. The design is free and open source, so there’s no tally of purchases. It's hard to say how many programmers use it. While hunting for tools after switching from a Mac to Windows, I started to see Solarized Dark and its sibling Solarized Light, which uses the same 16-color palette, practically everywhere I looked. I'm not a coder by trade, but I like to use code editors for writing and organizing notes. Staring at screens all day can make you particular about fonts and colors. But I soon found that I couldn't work with any other color scheme. To be honest, I didn't think much of Solarized at first. The colors were part of a theme called Solarized Dark for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson. Those bright red comments in the terminal were pretty horrible, though: I do most of my heavier editing in the GUI, so the “wrong” colors were pretty easy to tolerate. Everything looked fine in the GUI, but most of the colors were pretty far off in the terminal. I did manage to straighten that out pretty well, but things still weren’t quite right. Opening Emacs in a terminal would make the colors go weird in any existing Emacs GUI instance and vice versa. When I first set things up, it was just awful. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting my Solarized terminals and emacsclient to play nicely together. For many, many weeks, every time I opened a terminal I would think to myself, “this doesn’t look right!” These days, I am more likely to say that when I happen to see a gray-on-black terminal. I do know that I set my terminal emulator to the Solarized Dark colors, and I installed the Solarized Emacs theme and I forced myself to stick with it long enough to get used to it. I’m not sure exactly what finally made me give up my old color theme and give Solarized a try, but I do remember listening to The Changelog’s interview with the creator of Solarized, Ethan Schoonover. I guess that I had been clinging to those rainbow colors for over twenty years. Those were the colors they gave me when I installed Slackware 3.0 in 1996, and they were pretty much the same as the ANSI colors my 8088-based MS-DOS machine back in the late 1980s. I have been a long time user of the old, standard “Linux console” colors for a very long time. Some time last year, I decided it was finally time to try out a new color theme in my terminals and text editor. ![]()
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