Usability / colours

[Josef Dalcolmo]

I said:
>> all had black background on the screens, but I do find them more
>> tiring on the
>> eyes. Unfortunately, the default colour choices of some applications
>> in a
>> terminal with non-black background setting seem not very good.
>> Fortunately
>> this all seems to apply mostly to older (but still useful) apps.

wdesmet at yucom.be said:
> - Josef Isn't this a glare problem? Glare on a black screen is more
> impeding than on a coloured desktop. Actually I find black-white
> contrast pretty good on the eyes. But maybe that's just me, or my
> screen. 

I don't think this is just glare, since I notice the difference particularly 
in a dark room, e.g. without any light source for glare. It is much harder to 
focus your eyes on the letters alone, when the background is black. I don't 
know why, but on a late night session switching the background of the 
terminals to grey certainly relieves my eyes. I find this both on a CRT as 
well as on an TFT screen.

Although in the above case it may be too much contrast, my main point was 
minimal contrast. Under normal lighting conditions a dark blue writing on 
black background is indeed hard to read. And that is what Lynx is using by 
default. (Of course, putting "show_color=never" into ~/.lynxrc works just 
fine, apart from "color" being American spelling).

- Josef