Re: need to increase contrast in all emacs faces for legibility

[wry@mm.st]

On 12/10, Samuel Wales wrote:
>at night, i need much more contrast in my emacs faces in order to
>increase legibility.

This is counterintuitive, normally you need to increase contrast
during the day and decrease contrast (and lower brightness) at night
to prevent eye strain. Unless you're using an E Ink display or
something crazy, decreased ambient light should not affect legibility
(pixels are backlit), only eye strain.

>is it possible to programmatically increase foreground contrast
>against their background in all faces?

>i already have the background black or close to it.

Studies have suggested that light text on dark background is less
legible than dark text on light background, so you could change
that. Anecdotally this is true for me in Emacs and on the web, but the
decreased eye strain at night is worth the tradeoff of using a dark
background.

I doubt Emacs has this contrast functionality built in. You can always
change themes (M-x customize-themes). A quick Google of "Emacs high
contrast themes" yields at least one theme you could try.

You can even manually modify themes. Just go to the Elisp file and
play around with the theme definition. Use Gimp or Google "HTML color
picker" to find new colors to replace whichever color you're not
satisfied with.

If you're actually trying to reduce eye strain at night, there are
several tools at your disposal.

- Redshift has already been mentioned; I consider my computer
  basically unusable at night without it
- Decrease display brightness using software
  (e.g. https://github.com/haikarainen/light )
- Change brightness or color settings at the hardware level (by
  clicking buttons on your monitor)
- Add more ambient light around your monitor
- Computer blue-light filtering glasses (I don't know if they're effective or not)