Thank you!

I’m claiming it is an improvement in terms of usability, simply because Solarised wasn’t designed with these properties in mind. Whether it’s significant everyone needs to judge for themselves. I personally was mostly annoyed by how some colours are over-emphasised with Solarised, especially magenta and red, to a lesser degree orange.

You could take a fundamentally different approach and use different levels of emphasis for different colours, but I don’t think this was done in a quantitative and purposeful way. It’s also just not the approach I favour as I (and probably others) prefer an overall less busy look more like a text.

And aesthetics in general are of course subjective and were admittedly only of secondary consideration.

At first, your color palette made a very good first impression to me.

> I’m claiming it is an improvement in terms of usability, simply because Solarised wasn’t designed with these properties in mind.

Are you sure about that? On [1] and [2] the creator of Solarized describes why he choose low contrast and specific hue differences, representable in CIELAB. That sounds rather similar to your first three points in [3].

Even if the approaches have some similarities, it does doesn't denigrate your work. Thanks for continuing this line of work. And I am looking forward to test Penumbra in comparison to Solarized.

[1]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/#features

[2]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/

[3]: https://github.com/nealmckee/penumbra#Features

The reasoning on the first two points is the same, yes, simply because I agree with Ethan’s. The two big differences are: I’m aiming for perceptually uniform colour differences instead of the same luminance and my background colours are directly sampled from daylight.

For the colours, this means uniform chroma and hues that aren’t hand-picked but optimised (on top of that using a more hue-accurate colour space).

I’d argue there’s enough of a difference, especially in the visual result, to make this more than an iteration, but even if it was simple iterative, there’s nothing bad about that and it can still be valuable work without being plagiarism .

It is like solarized in the sense the colors have same luminance and are analogous. But it uses OKLab instead of CIELab.

> The search for a theme led me to Solarized by Ethan Schoonover, which I was ultimately not satisfied with but inspired me to try and improve on its ideas.

https://github.com/nealmckee/penumbra#acknowledgments

Which reminds me, of https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w... Selenized is another theme which aims to improve on Solarized.

https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/feature...

https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/balanci...

Wonder how they compare.

Many differences to my attempt: Luminance is kept different between colours according to some subjective “individuality”, I touched on why I decided against this in another comment. This has rippling effects as instead of being able to just make chroma uniform, one now needs to subjectively adjust both in tandem to get the same apparent brightness, which will never be as precise as doing it mathematically (which would require a full colour appearance model like CIECAM16). But then, luminance and chroma are still different across colours, so this still appear somewhat uneven. Compare the colour swatches here https://codepen.io/rguiscard/full/OJvZLpd to those of Selenized and you should see the difference. Same things goes for the choice of hues, they’re further apart on what appears to be an HSL-based colour wheel, but by no means optimally spaced (at least there’s no mention of it). Plus for all of this they used CIELab which simply isn’t as perceptually uniform as it claims to be, especially with respect to hue, so optimal spacing wouldn’t have even been possible.

It definitely improves on some of the same issues I had with Solarized, but in a non-rigorous way, with more of a “good enough” approach.

To my eye, you've done an outstanding job.

I agree. For me, the DarkContrast++ looked best to me. Clear, crisp and easily readable after a long, sleep deprived day. I'll definitely be giving this a shot in the morning.