[chrismorgan]

A few years ago, I threw out Molokai and made a deliberately-minimal and high-contrast colour scheme that I named “bland”. For the first two weeks, it was strictly black (#000) on white (#fff), with keywords bold, comments italic, escape sequences in strings bold italic, and things like Rust attributes underlined. I was fairly confident I’d want a little colour, but I wanted to give strict black-and-white a fair trial period before introducing anything further. After this self-imposed moratorium I made strings red, comments green and number literals blue, and have since made a few tweaks (e.g. italics instead of underline for Rust attributes, italics for macro invocations, and orange for things like macro variables), and made a dark variant somewhere along the way, but this is what I use to this day and find to work very well. It’s also what I use on my website, though generally with a slightly grey background rather than white.

Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).

Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).