On 11/09/2005, at 17.57, thomas Aylott wrote:
What themes have you used from previous systems or applications?
I was using StormC on Amiga -- unfortunately I can't find any screenshot of it, but the 4 Amiga colors can be seen here: http:// www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/duff/DefProtect/DefProtect.PNG
The editor used the standard grey background, black for text, white for comments, strings, and integers, bold for keywords, and bold blue for types (iirc).
Do you like black backgrounds? Do you like colored backgrounds?
I don't like black backgrounds, mostly because it makes the rest of the (surrounding) UI seem to bright. I do like colored backgrounds. Particularly I liked the Mint background, which reminds me of http:// daringfireball.net/ (which also has nice reading/coding colors) -- as for the grey Amiga background, I do seem to recall that when MagicWB was introduced, I switched to the “MWB Half-shine pen” which I think is the color used in the text fields on this grab: http:// www.sasg.com/mwb/gallery/stuntzi.gif (of course back then I was on a CRT, so the colors was darker).
Do you hate excessive use of background colors? ...for the page? ...for individual elements?
I like it for embedded code in HTML -- mostly when that code is single line though.
Do you like high contrast? Do you prefer lower contrast?
High contrast! My vision is sub-standard, so some colors look almost the same, when there's very little of them (like with letters), and they have similar contrast.
Do you like having a bunch of different colors or would you prefer one with shades of only a few colors? What colors do you like? Please give examples. Do you have synisthesia? Are certain elements 'supposed' to be a certain color?
Comments are supposed to be italic! And I prefer underline only on stuff which is like a headline (so like class name, not strings).
I also like the cursor to stand out -- it was to subtle on Mint, so I changed that to white cursor (removed plain text specific colors, which had white background).
What languages do you want to have colored? Do you want different languages to have different colors?
Eventually TM will allow themes to be bound to file types, so I don't think one theme should try to color languages differently, other than for effect (like All Hallow's Eve).