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For you other writers...
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...an article I came across this morning that might prove useful: http://lifehacker.com/5689579/five-best ... ting-tools]The Five Best Distraction-Free Writing Tools.
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak. 
I'm thinking of switching to vim in a full screen terminal window. No distractions, powerful editing abilities, has add ins to support version control systems or text-to-* conversion with simple markup systems like markdown...
----- Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.
Three green on black? Plus an orange on black? Why? o.O
At least I've always found that to be painful to stare at for too long. -Morgan. 
vim has a very powerful color schema. You can assign any syntax element (and I think nested syntax elements) to any color you want.
Personally I use this one. I make no claims that tweaking or creating a color scheme is easy, but installing one is. -Terry ----- "so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today" TF2: Spy 
a writer whose blog i follow uses http://www.literatureandlatte.com/ for his writing needs....
-Z, Post-reader at Medium ---- If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. Zojojojo Wrote:a writer whose blog i follow uses http://www.literatureandlatte.com/ for his writing needs....Be nice if they had a port for PC or Linux.
It's not so much whether or not something is configurable, as if that is the colors they use in their promotional screenshots, it suggest they think using those colors is a good idea. Which makes me go, "What the hell?"
-Morgan.
Old fashioned hackers, the lot of them. Us n00bz need not heed to their constraints of old.
I can see green on black coming from something like that. (After all, I've used such devices, which is how I know I'd rather not.)
But orange on black? -Morgan.
Amber monochrome monitors. Not uncommon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I wrote the first parts of GURPS IST circa 1988-89 on an early Toshiba laptop -- just smaller than a luggable -- that had an amber plasma screen.
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak. 
Some of the earliest monitors I used were amber, too. Much easier on the eyes than the green or white monitors available at the time, as I recall...
-- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
I think it's interesting what different folks consider to be preferable colour settings for their text and backgrounds. Obviously it comes out more prominently when writing or reading large passages. I mean, my early experience writing on computers was on DR-DOS and WordPerfect...which was a white text on blue background environment. Certainly not something I'd choose today.
White (or yellow) on blue is supposedly the best contrast for making stuff clearly visible...but you want contrast like that for road signs and stuff, not a page/screen you'll be staring at hours on end. I recall sitting through a workshop where the idiot of a professional trainer insisted that all PowerPoint presentation slides should be white-on-blue and nothing else. I was all, dude, you may be paid to teach people skills, but your grasp of aesthetics is fail. Is a white or pale background the best colour, though? It certainly isn't easy on the eyes either. I suspect we're just used to it because...well, that's what the printed page is. -- Acyl
I'm pretty sure white is the single worst choice for a background color... Mostly because white is not a color, white is literally all colors at once. White is what happens when all light is reflected off a substance. The color White is information overload for your eyes. Black on the other hand is all light absorbed by the object. So technically the single easiest thing to look at, as it requires no effort. True Black is the 404 error of the clor wheel. Of course slight variation make the True shades of those two non colors into actual colors.
You also have to remember that people see colors differently... and that is before color blindness kicks in. I know of one house that is all pastels like a hideous Easter Egg gone wrong... I know of one guy who upon seeing it reflexively recoiled and describe the color scheme as 'a crime against the neighborhood'. Apparently the old lady who owns it thinks it beautiful.
Unfortuneatly I write with about five to fifteen other windows open for reference (wikipedia, e-mails, notes, pictures and so on). So these kinds of programs are useless to me.
-------------- Epsilon Acyl Wrote:Is a white or pale background the best colour, though? It certainly isn't easy on the eyes either. I suspect we're just used to it because...well, that's what the printed page is. I think one important thing about white backgrounds is that, when it comes to books, the paper is usually a matte white, while computer monitors tend to be pretty shiny overall. It seems to make a significant difference. Judging by the hardware I see coming in, people making e-book readers are going to great lengths to make screens where white looks more like white paper than white monitor. If I were going to be staring at a plaintext editor for a long time on end, I'd probably go for black on some sort of mild gray. But if I'm staring at the computer for a long time, it's more likely to be programming, where I'm going between multiple tools with their own color schemes, reference documents, etc., and it seems to be less of an issue. (Like, for a ruby project, I'll regularly be going back and forth between black on white, white on black, and black on *pink*, and that's before getting into any project-specific material.) -Morgan. Epsilon Wrote:Unfortuneatly I write with about five to fifteen other windows open for reference (wikipedia, e-mails, notes, pictures and so on). So these kinds of programs are useless to me.Epsilon, if you have Mac available, then you should check out the link Zojojojo posted. Whatever that writing software is, it handles all of what you just listed and more in a very clean and slick fashion.  Morganni Wrote:I think one important thing about white backgrounds is that, when it comes to books, the paper is usually a matte white, while computer monitors tend to be pretty shiny overall. It seems to make a significant difference. Judging by the hardware I see coming in, people making e-book readers are going to great lengths to make screens where white looks more like white paper than white monitor. That's the difference. Computer monitors 'shine' white... they give off light, whereas book paper (and e-ink) only reflect light. Our eyes aren't really designed to stare at light source constantly, which is what they usually end up doing on a computer screen. The effect is similar to listening to a speech while someone is playing white noise in the background. It's very straining and can get painful. Turning down monitor brightness helps.... I've my laptop screen set to the minimum necessary to read things correctly. But really, a light text on a dark background is far easier to read and pickout for me. It's not assaulting my eyes. ________________________________ --m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig? blackaeronaut Wrote:Epsilon, if you have Mac available, then you should check out the link Zojojojo posted. Whatever that writing software is, it handles all of what you just listed and more in a very clean and slick fashion.No Mac, but even so I find a standard text editors works fine enough. I just hot-key between tabs and windows as needed. And having a browser open makes the occasional trip to dictionary.com or wikipedia or tvtropes or wherever for information I need easy enough. Then again, I find the best method of writing for me is to use one hour segements, with 45 minutes of writing and 15 minutes of "break time" for watching youtube or surfing rpg.net or what have you. -------------------- Epsilon |
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