Is your editors color theme too dark?

[Jibz]

This post is based on a blog post I wrote recently: Not Quite Monokai

If you feel some of the popular editor color themes are perhaps a bit on the dark side, there is a chance they were originally developed for TextMate, and your Windows editor is not interpreting the colors quite right.

You can look at screenshots here, here, or here, and compare them to how these color themes look in Sublime Text, Atom, Notepad++, and other editors on Windows/Linux.

The difference is due to color spaces^w, where TextMate uses Apple's Generic RGB profile by default, and most Windows editors assume sRGB (see the blog post for more details). When people converted the themes from TextMate to other editors, not many did the proper conversion.

Here are some screenshots comparing a few popular color themes. At the top of each screenshot is what the original TextMate theme looks like in Sublime Text 3 on Windows, and below is how the theme looks when the colors are converted from Generic RGB to sRGB. Notice how the contrast between background and text is more pleasing (at least to me), and the red-ish colors look more in line with the rest.

Monokai:



RailsCasts (idleFingers):



Tomorrow Night:



Twilight:

[phitsc]

Very interesting. I have often wondered why these themes don't come with a darker background resulting in better contrast!

Thanks for the heads up.