Some More Bytes

Those who spend many hours in front of an IDE writing code will know how much an LCD screen can make your eyes strain.

It is not new that monospaced fonts make an overall better alignment, improving the scan speed while reading code. There are a lot of Monospaced fonts there. The one I’ve been using is called Consolas. Just google it and you’ll find a lot more. ProggyFonts, Pragmata and Inconsolata are great too. However, proportional fonts are in general a bit easier on the eye. I compensate this modifying the color scheme of my editors.

Color schemes can help you improve redability on the code while providing a more comfortable experience using less contrast between the background of the screen and the font. My personal solution for many years was just setting the background color of my code editors in a medium gray tone instead the default white. Just this small change already did a great good to my eyes.

Recently, I’ve been looking for real color schemes, with appropiate syxtax color styles. There’s a lot written about this. In my search I came up with Zenburn, a Vim color scheme, and I inmediately fell in love with it.

Using Zenburn with the Consolas font is in my opinion one of the best editor setups for coding during long hours, specially in the dark.

Here you have some links:

Zenburn For Visual Studio (Jeff Attwood)
Zenburn Remixed for Visual Studio (more relaxed highlight and command console). This is the one I’m using, just with a smaller font.
Zenburn for Notepad++ (better than the integrated one)
Zenburn for Vim
Zenburn (and more) for Eclipse and CDT

Gvim Zenburn