Developers and Dark Colour Schemes

Jan 25, 2017

Recently at our office our small development team moved from downstairs to upstairs.The upstairs has some skylights so the amount of glare is significantly higher and all of us were complaining about it. What I found fascinating though was the fact that the two of us who use Linux (Centos 7) found the glare situation worse than anyone else.

It didn’t take me long to realize the reason for that was that both of us use dark colour schemes which makes the issue of glare worse. So I did a search for Windows 10 screenshots, MacOS screenshots and Linux screenshots on Google Images. Very few of the Windows screenshots show dark backgrounds. With MacOS the number was higher but with Linux the number was significantly higher, particular if any sort of xterm type window was being displayed.

I’m well aware of the fact that most of the screenshots for Windows and MacOS would be for desktops that are not being used for development. What would be interesting to investigate deeper is whether there is any correlation between the amount of time spent in console/xterm type applications and darker colour schemes.