I've been thinking a lot about this recently.

If each color represents a different wavelength, and our eyes/brain respond differently to different wavelength, then whats the best colorscheme-background, text, and highlighting- to keep concentration up and eye strain down?

Right now I'm using a purplish/blue white on top of dark blue/purple. It seems to be working well.

Old commodore green really hurts my eyes..

I see a lot of people use yellow text on black background. But I personally still use black/white. (with keywords in different colors of course)

This is probably more a refresh problem than color. Nevertheless, softer colors such as light yellows in the backround seem to help me stare at really tiny lettering, which I prefer to do so I can see more text on the screen.

Thoams

soft and friendly colours, like the muted blue seen on LQ are nice as backgrounds. Don't try and put something light against white, yellow and white are painful. (straight) red and blue is gross.

soft background, with stronger and contrasting colours is nice.

titanium_geek

I also prefer black text on yellow-ish background.

In ~/.Xdefaults I have:

xterm*background: Wheat
emacs*background: Wheat
emacs*Foreground: Black
emacs.pane.menubar.background: SkyBlue4
emacs.pane.menubar.foreground: Wheat

I got that color called "Wheat" some years ago from some file called something like "colors.txt" (or so) from the XFree86 package IRCC. This file listed quite a lot of color-names + RBG-values. There was also a x-program that displayed them.

I can't seem to find neither of them now... Does anybody know where those have gone? (I'm using XFree86 4.3.0 from debian sarge these days)

On my slackware system with Xorg, the color names are listed in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt

Right. I was mistaking "colors.txt" for "rgb.txt"
Found it on debian-sarge at /etc/X11/rgb.txt.
Thanks.

I like best the default GNU Emacs color scheme.

Commodore "green"? What was that? I don't recall any Commodore system which had green as either a default text or background color. Commodore 128, perhaps? I do remember that the default light blue on dark blue of the Commodore 64 was rather annoying.

I tend to prefer light grey on black, with yellow/amber for text selections. For a CRT display, a dark background looks nice while pure white tends to be too bright and hurts my eyes.

Try Commodore Pet which predates the home computer toys that you mentioned(we had three c-64s).

Thomas

Ah, I never did see a PET. My first Commodore system was a VIC-20.