[ars]

White text on black is my second favorite. Only thing better is green text on black.

The reason is very simple: There's less light coming from the screen into my eye.

Every monitor I've ever owned I reduce the brightness to the lowest setting possible, and they are still too bright.

Green is best because the high resolution parts of your eye only see green. So the blue and red components of white are just unnecessary extra light.

[bitwize]

Oh boy, are you going to love this state-of-the-art new display technology: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4142/4765726924_0c81d46a5b_b.j...

(Seriously, though, there may be an underlying physiological reason why the glow of a green phosphor CRT was so pleasing...)

[ars]

I always set my IDE to emulate those green CRT's when I can.

But there is an underlying physiological reason, see: https://gamesx.com/misctech/visual.htm (the website is very old and has aged badly, but makes the point).

Your eye has no ability to see blue in high resolution.

[bitwize]

For me it's Emacs in a terminal, set to a nice chunky bitmap (or bitmap-alike) font and #7fff7f foreground on black background. :) (For amber, try the X11 color "goldenrod", or #daa520!)

I'm aware of cool-retro-term. It is cool, but not useful for more than five minutes or so at a time.

[viraptor]

I'm curious about your experience with HDR / other real-black displays. I have the same "problem", but find the new TVs with high contrast / darker blacks much nicer to look at. New MBP seems good too. I haven't tried a HDR monitor at home though - maybe you have some experience?