If HN believes creative thinking is a waste of time I’ll get downvoted for this but I fancy just letting my imagination go wild so here goes...<p>Video gamers can supposedly differentiate between tones more similar to one another than non-gamers. Perhaps, if you made a theme of very similar colors, you could achieve the same benefit from programming. Although I suspect it might not work because the difference in the colors has to have significance for your brain to really start paying attention to it. So you could have a color-sensitive language. Or maybe color could be the only significant thing, then you could just bind each character to a color in your text editor and use a normal language.<p>While walking in the wood today and looking at the detail on the ground and searching for ripe fruit in the trees I was thinking about how our brains are really good at picking out specific visual things from noise and how more complex visual things are sometimes easier to recognize than simpler things. Also its possible to get really good at picking out subtle clues from very complex input: think about a native American Indian’s ability to track moving animals over long distances.<p>So I think what would be really cool is to have a way of representing each function of a program as a visual form, ideally a 3-dimensional one. You could then look at these form and over time you would start to be able to see certain things about the function just by looking at the forms. I wonder if that might be a much faster way of searching for specific things within a large body of code such as you might do in a security audit than actually reading through all the code because it taps into the innate concurrency of the right-hemisphere.<p>There would be some difficulty would be in generating appropriate visual forms. The form has to be meaningful. The ideal would be if it were meaningful to the point where somebody well used to them could write the code a form represented just by looking at the form or, at least, infer the gist of it. Of course you don’t have to limit yourself to one form per function, you could have 10 different forms per function, each representing different properties, or forms generated from by dividing the code in lots of different ways (not just functions). Or maybe you could simplify everything I’m saying here and just have a lot more statistical static analysis of code then displayed with charts and infographics.
I like the themeing trend towards dark backgrounds and pastel colors.<p>I've been using Zenburn [1] for a couple years now, and I've really grown used to its unsaturated colors. 'Tomorrow' looks way too colorful for my taste, kinda like eating something too sweet after weaning yourself off sugar :)<p>My problem with Zenburn is that, unlike Tomorrow or Solarized, it doesn't have a good curated list of themes for various systems. I've had to hunt and peck for themes for Emacs, Konsole, Awesome, Chromium, Thunderbird, QT, GTK, and at this point would be challenged to provide a source and method for each...<p>[1] <a href="http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburnpage/" rel="nofollow">http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburnpage/</a>
JavaScript in ST2 looks gorgeous in Tomorrow Night 80s. Java, not so much. Keywords, class names and annotations all being the same color makes for <i>a lot</i> of lavender.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/8wRBN.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/8wRBN.png</a>
Vim users should go here: <a href="http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com" rel="nofollow">http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com</a> if they haven't before, that's where I found darkburn, a darker variant of zenburn that I've been happy with for a couple years.
I originally used "Tomorrow Theme - Solarized was yesterday" as a title for this post. However, I agree with the crowd that this title was a little bit to agressive (some might call it marketing).<p>I never liked Solarized, for me this is a replacement for the awesome Twilight theme.
Personally, I don't like "rainbow themes". Too many dissonant colors add more cognitive load than meaning.<p>I recommend this one: <a href="http://hcalves.deviantart.com/#/d2x1yjo" rel="nofollow">http://hcalves.deviantart.com/#/d2x1yjo</a>
I really wanted to like this, but I think that colors preferences are both subjective and born of habit/experience which leads to wiring our brains to expect certain colors for certain things, because I don't like pastels, and I don't like red as a non-alert color.<p>It's a good idea, with a lot of thought put into it. The author should keep trying. Maybe there is more than one right option.<p>Personally, I think the best way to do this is by a "hot or not" site for fonts and colors. Have a page for each language with "hot or not" of random fonts and color combinations until the stats show which combinations certain groups like. Tie in other surveys as well and give away gift certificates to Amazon each month as a prize for over 100 votes that aren't outliers.
I use this theme since I ever saw it in every editor or alike I use (Zsh, Xcode, Vim, Sublime Text 2) and I'm really happy with it! The colors IMO are more distinguishable than on solarized but this seems to be a matter of taste. Just try it out if you are looking for a new theme.<p>BTW: as many mentioned it is awesome that the theme is available for so many editors!<p>Edit: Should have mentioned that I use always that Tomorrow Night Eighties theme
Speaking of using color as a formal syntax in a graphical programming language. The example found at <a href="http://www.coretalk.net/CubiconPrivate/CubiconPaper/MemoryManager.zip" rel="nofollow">http://www.coretalk.net/CubiconPrivate/CubiconPaper/MemoryMa...</a> (User: Cubist1 and Password: Sandy2) is the executable design of the Memory Manager module for a next-generation virtual machine (VM). The visual directory on the left of the screen is a number of control-flow methods, interleaved with white and gray backgrounds. The colored icons express fundamental language constructs, in this case, memory pointer transfer, comparisons, and the like. This set of methods compiles into 37 KBytes of ANSI C.
Doesn't seem to have the technical justifications of Ethan Shoonover's solarized [ <a href="http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized" rel="nofollow">http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized</a> ] but looks pretty well thought out to me.
I really, really like this. I've been a fan of Twilight/ir-black style themes for a while, but could never find one with the perfect ratio of contrast to visual noise -- especially for console Vims. Now I have.
Monokai is popular choice for many initially, it looks good but hurts eyes. Solarized on the other hand seems to lack contrasts at times.<p>After spending a great amount of time in 'Merbivore Soft', then 'Made of Code' last year, I've fallen in love with 'Tomorrow' - ST2 & XCode. Mostly for the vibrant colors and pleasant contrast. Clojure too looks very nice in this.<p>Coal Graal is another nice theme - <a href="http://goo.gl/fH9rP" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/fH9rP</a> <a href="http://goo.gl/4nCHk" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/4nCHk</a>
For Terminal.app I still prefer Optometrist: <a href="https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the mentioned theme.
I've used Monokai since the realease of ST. Then i switched to Solarized light but it wore me down really fast on long hours, i tried Solarized dark but to no avail (the blue is just too much). I then saw a reailcasts video and thought it was worth a shot. Then i moved to zenburn (wich i still use at the terminal and vim) but switched to Espresso Soda on ST2. I just swtiched to Tomorrow since it looks more coupled in terms of a swatch.
Thanks for posting this theme. Here's what I've been doing for quite some time now:<p>- Terminal: ir_black, monaco 11 pt.<p>- Vim (console): ir_black, monaco 11 pt.<p>- MacVim: molokai, inconsolata, 14 pt.<p>I've been using emacs lately, though, where I've been using the twilight theme because zenburn wasn't working for me from the marmalade repo.<p>This theme is going everywhere. I really like the chalkboard/pastel color combo and have settled on this for now since it nice on my eyes.
I like this theme, and used it for a while but I find myself going back for monokai.<p>A little off-topic: What do HN people prefer, light or dark themes?
Thanks for the theme. Changed Zenburn with Tomorrow-Night-Bright and feels very good. Zenburn was not able to show visual selections in a proper color. Also, non printable characters were showing very bright.
Problems solved with Tomorrow theme.
I've been trying to use solarized off and on for a while now, but the text highlight just doesn't have enough contrast for me. Any highlighted text is unreadable. Tomorrow Night looks like it doesn't have this problem. Awesome!
When I used Notepad++ my favorite theme was Waher[1]. I've since switched to Sublime Text 2 but do miss it, Monokai just isn't doing it for me.<p>[1] <a href="http://waher.net/archives/1013" rel="nofollow">http://waher.net/archives/1013</a>
I have been using this theme for years and I absolutely love it. I'm surprised it got upvoted so much on HN since it's not new at all, but by all means I would upvote this 1000 more times if I could. Amazing theme
Wow, that's a nice one. Very readable, not too pastel... I almost never use the more 'stylish' themes because I find their tradeoffs a pain, but this might be an improvement on anything I've used thus far.
So I'm not sure if I'm slow or what, but I'm not getting any of the Tomorrow or Base16 Textmate themes to import into Aptana. Imported a few other .tmThemes and they work fine. Any ideas?
Awesome! Having a color theme available for most/all tools I use is amazingly useful! I have been looking for such an alternative to Solarized for a while!
Personally I love jellybeans.vim<p>It works great in a 256 color console and in a GUI.<p><a href="https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim</a>
Disappointed that it took me about 5 minutes to figure out why this was so important to HN. Neither the title or the link gives much information about what this is or why it is so great.<p>Maybe I'm just dumb.