> There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though, Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience
This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark.
For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good. When I introduced it to a coworker, he didn't want to switch to it because of the low contrast. After a week of using it, he can't imagine going back to high contrast.
As for the rest, while I do agree with some points, I will say: If you make Emacs more like VS Code, then people will have even fewer reasons to use Emacs.
It's an accessibility issue. Low contrast sucks for people with vision issues. dark mode can be kinda sucky too. Not that the default modes of most editors are much better. I'm color blind and have never really found a totally satisfactory scheme.
Hue contrast is objectively worse than brightness contrast because human cone cells are lower resolution than rod cells. This is the reason chroma subsampling is used in lossy video/image compression.
> For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good.
I stare at a computer all day and I hate low contrast themes, including solarized.
I am not claiming my view applies to everyone, so please, could you stop doing that. It is subjective: there is nothing inherently superior about solarized, even for people who stare at screens all day.
And it is not just an accessibility issue. It is a subjectivity issue.
Personally I find that contrast between different themes, that is when switching from say one website to another, is the most eye strain inducing. Going from reading black on white to white on black or vice versa just hurts.
I keep everything black/dark on white themed since that's how most of the world works. I suspect many who use certain themes experience eye strain when viewing normal stuff and falsely assume it proves the efficacy of their theme.
This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark.
For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good. When I introduced it to a coworker, he didn't want to switch to it because of the low contrast. After a week of using it, he can't imagine going back to high contrast.
As for the rest, while I do agree with some points, I will say: If you make Emacs more like VS Code, then people will have even fewer reasons to use Emacs.
[1] https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/