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Comment by quicksilver03 | Hacker News Reader

> Also the arguments regarding colorblind crowd being unable to distinguish colors are weak, as accessibility best practices suggest to convey semantically relevant markup and content in multiple sensory means, so that everybody has their chance to understand it (e.g. setting links in a distinguished color and underlined).

It's not color blindness, it's lack of basic testing in real-world conditions where not everyone can use dark-themed terminals.

The default colors in Debian's 'ls' output, or 'ncdu', blend perfectly with a light background theme, so the net result is a loss of information for the user.

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I'm using terminals with dark background and often suffer from programs using dark blue which is hard to distinguish from the background (even with changes in terminal settings to make it less dark). So at least some by default expect light background. Vim being one of them (I have to keep COLORFGBG='default;default;0' in environment for it).

Use the Tango color scheme.

vim predates the fashion for dark backgrounds, so it gets it wrong for a different subset of people. Try `set background=dark` in your .vimrc.

(I believe neovim uses the DCS 11 inquiry to determine the actual background colour on xterm-compatibles. I believe vim currently does not, relying on environment variables only. I may be stale or otherwise mistaken on both.)

> vim predates the fashion for dark backgrounds,

If anything, the correct version of this statement would be "Vim was created when light backgrounds were a fad".

The "natural" background of the terminal is dark, including ADM-3A (terminal "responsible" of vi's HJKL).

The “natural” background for text is light though. Hard to find books, newspapers, or magazines that put a dark background behind text of any significant length.

Accordingly, the Xerox Alto had a light background too, back in the 1970s. Demonstrated here with Smalltalk:

https://youtu.be/NqKyHEJe9_w

And here with a GUI based text editor:

https://youtu.be/2Z43y94Dfzk

As did Engelbart's NLS, as seen in ‘the mother of all demos’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

What little actual research exists suggests dark on light is more readable for people with normal vision. People with cataracts benefit from light on dark, and people with astigmatism benefit from dark on light.

Light background for books IMHO is no more natural than dark background for old CRT displays - both are what works best for a given medium: while making dark paper is not harder than light one, it is hard to make a pencil or ink which would be clearly visible on black paper (white markers do exists but they are a recent invention). Blackboard and chalk where natural until we got plastic whiteboards and easy to erase markers.

Modern screens are more or less unique in not limiting background colors so we can use any and and argue which one is better.

Actually there is at least one more common media where we can freely choose between dark and light (at least in the last 100+ years) - guide signs on roads. Both options are common (e. g. white on green/blue and black on white). But even if there are studies showing which background is better for signs it is not necessary the same for a computer screen: road sign should be legible from a maximum distance under variety of conditions - from a sunny day to LED lighting at nigh or heavy rain. Legibility is the main design goal. Computers on other hand are usually used in an environment where we can control lighting to some degree and a distance is fixed. Legibility is important but comfort is important as well (choose of colors should minimize eye strain / fatigue in case if it can affect this).

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