On Apr 6, 2005, at 11:02, David Lee wrote:
to my mind it depends on the ambient light a lot as well. Dark b/g seems to make a lot more sense late at night ..
Yes -- I think the thesis is something like, the majority of space is the background color, if this is dark/black, your eye will not pick up much light, and thus will be dilated. This means that the retina is more exposed and the “bright” white text will affect it more (how bad for your eyes this actually is, I don't know).
If OTOH the background is white, your eyes will be less dilated, and thus, even though the intensity of the white background is the same as the white text (in the dark color scheme) your eyes will be affected less by it (since they are less dilated).
So the key is to find a color scheme where the most dominant color is around the same intensity or brighter than the lesser used colors -- I think the current dark color schemes for TextMate does this very well.
And just for the records, I'm not a doctor, so if you do ruin your eyes by looking at grey text on a black background, do not blame me! ;)