from Hacker News

Show HN: OKSolar: Improving Solarized using the OKLab perceptual colorspace

by zacharyvoase on 11/19/22, 9:03 PM with 31 comments

• by hnbad on 11/22/22, 10:09 AM

  It's funny how the last section with the screenshots mentions "preserving accessibility". "Fixing the lightness and only modifying hue and chroma" is not a recipe for good accessibility and the screenshots demonstrate it.

  I'm severely green-blind and in the earlier screenshots of the Solarized palette I already hat issues telling red and orange, and blue and violet apart. But with the new palette I now struggle with red, orange AND green, and magenta and cyan also have become less distinct from each other.

  Solarized wasn't very accessible to begin with (few syntax highlighting color palettes are) but this is just worse. If you learn about color theory as a hobby, please also take the time to learn about color vision and before making claims about accessibility also learn about how color vision deficiencies affect perception.

  It's nice that the author admits they had to learn about color theory in order to approach this, i.e. they didn't know much about color before, but please don't claim this is an "improvement" if you really only tried to increase the light-dark contrast of the text against the background. Solarized is a fairly low-contrast theme to begin with and increasing its contrast while maintaining its general aesthetic would have been an interest goal but this article doesn't seem to actually be interested in doing that.

• by throwaway104739 on 11/22/22, 9:24 AM

  Selenized[0] is an another attempt at improving on solarized.

  [0]: https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/

• by easytiger on 11/22/22, 10:18 AM

  > For me, the contrast between text and the background is just a little too low

  I have always thought this with Solarized, on many monitors over many years. Perhaps my eyes aren't as good as others, but i found it instantly fatiguing

• by bloopernova on 11/22/22, 1:05 PM

  I don't mean for this to sound negative but I'm confused by the effort to make the different shades the same perceived brightness.

  Isn't a significant part of a colour scheme the ability to more easily distinguish between elements? In my terminal and text editor I want to pick out the relevant information quickly.

  I hate asking stuff like this because it sounds like I'm dismissive of the really cool article/experiment I just read.

• by jnsaff2 on 11/22/22, 9:55 AM

  To me the problem with solarized dark has always been that my brain keeps telling me that my monitor is broken as it "bleeds backlight". I like the rest of it but whenever I use it I just turn the background to more or almost completely black. So much better.

  I guess the same very low contrast is a problem for the light one too. This here did not improve it.

  Nowadays I mostly use something else.

• by bscphil on 11/22/22, 9:50 AM

  > For me, the contrast between text and the background is just a little too low (especially if I’m working in a bright space), and you can see that it also varies between different token types.

  Strange. For the dark scheme, it fixes the saturation and lightness difference between colors, but it doesn't seem to improve the contrast ... at all? Are my eyes lying to me? You decide: https://i.imgur.com/vFa06CE.png

  I think this is an interesting approach, maybe I'll try using it with a significantly darker background color.

• by zokier on 11/22/22, 10:48 AM

  One thing I'm bit confused about is the relationship between oklab(/oklch) and different colorspaces; are srgb-oklab and p3-oklab different things? Or is oklab something that exists independent of srgb/p3/whatever? In web they seem bit intermixed in a confusing way. And does HDR add yet another dimension here is needed for "full" color specification.

• by floatrock on 11/22/22, 1:46 PM

  Anyone assemble this into a jetbrains theme file?

  Author links to a json file https://meat.io/oksolar.json but haven't done manual jetbrains theming so hoping more experienced eyes have taken a stab at it.

• by ibotty on 11/22/22, 8:42 AM

  Great to see that getting more traction than my submission. I hope to find time to incorporate it into my terminal. Are there already some projects generating the various color schemes?

• by antman on 11/22/22, 8:52 AM

  Removing contrast towards more washed out colors does not look like an improvement. Examples at the end look less legible both in too much light and in less light.

• by Gordonjcp on 11/22/22, 10:36 AM

  Why is this supposed to be good? What's with the fashion for very-pale-grey-on-slightly-paler-grey text?

• by jeffreygoesto on 11/19/22, 9:24 PM

  Paying attention to details can really make a difference. Looks as if it reduces latent stress when using it.

• by Terretta on 11/21/22, 6:14 PM

  So familiar, but improved.