Most of my students seems to prefer the ‘Dark’ desktop and tool theme. So this is getting popular, and I was reluctant to use it. But tools support is getting better (see MCUXpresso IDE) and I switched do the ‘dark’ side for now :-).
But what do you prefer? Not Eclipse in particular, but as a general color theme? Is it the ‘new’ Dark, black, darker-than-dark, … theme?
Dark Theme
Or is it the ‘classic’ Light, bright, white, … theme?
Light Theme
Please let us know:
Happy undarking 🙂
MCU on Eclipse 
I prefer also dark themes and switch to them if available.
But the dark theme from eclipse looks uncompleted. The scroll-bar and the menu is still in grey colour. Others to better jobs here. However, eclipse is not my preferred development environment anyway.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That MCUXpresso IDE is not on the latest Eclipse version. That scrollbar thing has been discussed very much in the Eclipse forums and is now fixed in the latest version. It is true that not only for Eclipse many tools are not dealing perfectly with the themes, including the ones from the host OS vendors like Microsoft. I think with getting themes more popular, this will gradually improve over time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Erich,
I find the light background easier to read. The ‘Dark Side’ as you call it, reminds me of the early days of engineering CAD tools, when rooms full of CAD technicians captured schematics and laid out boards in window-free rooms with the lights turned out, because that was the only kind of CRT you could buy. I prefer a desktop that looks like the paper I print data out on.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Gary, thanks for mentioning these early days. I still remember the time with black on green/amber terminals where finally SUN came out with their black on white huge graphics screens back 30 years or so. As for the black theme: I have to admit that I was skeptical (and I am still) but after a few days somehow the ‘darker’ themes seemed to be better, especially if getting back to the light one. I think there is clearly an adoption to it. What I start feeling is that during the day a bright theme seems to be better, while having a darker theme in the morning and evening seems to be more in sync with ‘nature’. I have started using ‘intelligent’ LED lights which can mimic the daylight and the differences of it, and I have to say that this ‘looks’ really ‘right’. But not sure if this is only me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For my day-to-day work on the workstation in the office I use light themes for everything but console applications, which means the KDE Plasma desktop including IDEs (KDevelop most of the time), and »graphical« editors. It’s simply more friendly to my eyes and keeps me awake, so I don’t have the impression it’s night and time for bed. However all consoles are dark and I hit Vim on the console for smaller editing needs all of the time. So it’s more a mixed approach here.
What was a huge improvement in comfort was switching to the Solarized themes for most of the applications/editors last year. That’s so much better than this high contrast approach and switching from solarized light to solarized dark theme and back is very smooth, I even have a shortcut for that in Vim. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was not aware of the Solarized theme and did some research/search on it. Result: I really like it! I think it has good contrast with pleasing colors.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well, back in the day, screens were dark and, if you got a cool monitor, text was amber. The first one I worked on, the paper was yellowish and the text black from the ribbon ink (ASR-33). These days I prefer the light side but I can see where this would be one of those things that you prefer what you get used to. After this many years of light, I’m used to light and the dark side is jarring. I do note that the younger crowd seems to like dark tho. Maybe, as Erich notes, it’s because they are working at 3AM (I don’t do that anymore)…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Randy,
I’m getting as well to the conclusion that the younger among us seem to prefer the dark(er) themes, while the ‘older’ ones seem to enjoy more the light theme one.
Maybe in a next survey there should be an additional question about the age to make a correlation.
LikeLiked by 1 person