The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Solarized and Linux on the Desktop (Interview)

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Wynn sat down with Ethan Schoonover, creator of Solarized to talk about the science and design behind the wildly popular color scheme as well as his love for Arch Linux.

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Featuring:

  • Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

  • Ethan Schoonover is a freelance designer, creator of Solarized.
  • Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications.
  • Vimscript can be intimidating for noobs.
  • The Solarized palette aims to maximize sixteen colors, providing contrast on both dark and light backgrounds
  • Ethan works in the CIELAB:

    • A Lab color space is a color-opponent space with dimension L for lightness and a and b for the color-opponent dimensions, based on nonlinearly compressed CIE XYZ color space coordinates.

    • Achievement unlocked: First guest to mention fovea centralis on the show.
    • “This fellow Wright” is W. David Wright, who experimented with color perception in 1930s.
    • Ethan works out of the LAB space, mapping to other color spaces as tools require.
    • Solarized looks great in a number of fonts as well as syntaxes.
    • Wynn asks if Sass should support LAB.
    • Terminus is Ethan’s favorite fixed with font, but also likes Letter Gothic Mono.
    • Wynn’s litmus test for fixed fonts is the dashrocket alignment.
    • Micah Rich, founder of The League of Movable Type was on Episode 0.7.4.
    • Arch Linux is Ethan’s favorite Linux distro.
    • xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell.
    • The tmux reference on the Arch wiki is most helpful. Check out Episode 0.7.3 for more on tmux.
    • TotalTerminal from the talented Antonin Hildebrand.
    • brew tap makes it easy to tap a new Homebrew formula repository from GitHub, or list existing taps.
    • Freshmeat.net is now freecode.com.
    • GIMP is no Photoshop replacement.
    • Haskell is an advanced, purely-functional programming language.
    • XMonad.Prompt.Input is similar to Quicksilver.
    • Karthik’s terminal convinced Wynn to give Solarized a go.
    • Wynn figured out how to do ‘transparent’ colors in the tmux status bar.
    • TaskWarrior is Ethan’s todo manager, which is saying something since he created Kinkless GTD.
    • Drew Neil, creator of Vimcasts, featured on Episode 0.5.6.
    • Dr. Nic Williams, on Episode #50.

      • Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

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