tecosystems

Pretty is a Feature

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Gnome Terminal

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

When first embarking on the job hunt towards the tail end of my college career, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to take a set of career aptitude type exams. You might know them; these are the tests where you answer fifty questions and they return an eerily accurate impression of your personality. Some of the results, of course, were more illuminating than others, but much of the quasi-psycho analysis merely confirmed things that I already knew. For example, it informed me politely that I possess the design sense of a blind monkey. And following this conversation with Alex, I was once more reminded of this unavoidable truth.

On the way back from Mashup Camp, he took the time to show me TextMate, a basic coding oriented text editor that I was vaguely familiar with but had never used (not least b/c I don’t have an OS X environment). It’s dramatically less ambitious than the full blown IDEs we’re used to covering, and yet is the editor of choice for every Rails core contributor. Clearly, something was up. Besides some very friendly syntax highlighting and occasionally nifty code completion, however, I didn’t see a ton to differentiate the product from a number of other editors. Except for the aesthetics, that is.

TextMate, in my limited experience, is a very pretty application. That may seem trivial in the context of discussions of “enterprise features” and so on, but the fact of the matter is that if you’re going to be spending a lot of time in an environment, it’s better if it looks nice (one reason why I just spiffed up my Gnome install). Go figure.

But more important than the fact that it looks nice to start is that it appreciates the simple truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It supports, as I believe all editors should, user selectable themes that allow for coordinated color schemes. To its credit, it also goes one step further and permits users to design and share themes with each other (why more applications don’t do this is beyond me, buy I digress). Alex, for example, runs a theme that involves white and colored text against a black background; one which I found rather alien at first, but came to appreciate after trying to read it for a couple of minutes.

I appreciated it so much, in fact, that when I returned to my machine I made every effort to replicate this theme in the tools at my disposal: the Gnome terminal (pictured: select “white on black” as the default theme in the colors tab), Gedit, and Eclipse. Unfortunately, with the notable exception of Gnome terminal, most of my appliations made altering the default colors and fonts hideously difficult (here are the instructions for Eclipse – ugh). Instead of letting me pick a new theme that’s been prechosen for me, I’m forced to select colors and fonts on a far more granular basis. As if changes to one selection don’t affect another.

Unfortunately for me, that’s not the case: as soon as I’m presented with the option to begin picking colors individually, I give up, because, well, we all know what my design sense is like. Odds are running at close to 100% that I’ll wind up with an editor worse looking than the one I started with. Hence the importance of themes, which allow those more skilled in the visual arts than I to preselect a set of colors that work well together for me.

But why is this all important? It’s just a bunch of colors, right? Well, tell that to the folks using OS X. Just trust me on this – when it comes to developers, pretty is a feature.

7 comments

  1. For clarification, the main reason I use a dark background is to reduce eye strain.

    I have configured BBEdit to use the same basic color scheme, but where TextMate beats the pants off BBEdit is (as you noted) with the theme switching capabilities.

    The most obvious practical application of this is when using my laptop outside. In the sunlight, it’s easier to see dark text on a light background than vice versa – and TextMate’s themes let me switch between these choices easily.

  2. White on black is actually harder to read than black on white after a few minutes.

    You should change the black to a slightly dark gray. That really reduces eye-strain.

    Alternatively, try changing your white background to a slightly yellowish color or a light grey, so it looks more like it’s paper instead of some unholy white field.

  3. My “black” is actually about 90%.

  4. Pretty is a feature for people. Pretty is a feature for developers because developers are people. I risk coming off as a UI zealot by saying this, but too much time is spent on feature development and not enough on UI development.

    The very few applications out there that Actually Get that features are useless unless they are findable and usable are the immensely popular ones, and the rest of us developers still haven’t cottoned on to that. The same is true for standards: HTML took off because HTML parsers are incredibly tolerant of error. WS-* is dying the death because it’s insufficiently discoverable and its tools are not tolerant of error. Java’s ubiquitous, meaningful stack traces are *one of the languages most important features*.

  5. I think this helps to explain the popularity of color-theme.el for Emacs.

  6. A Whole Bunch of Little Stuff

    Today’s proved to be an exciting day so far: I caught with an old friend from the Mesa/FX days, John Arley Burns. It turns out he’s had a lot of experience in his current job testing out open source systems…

  7. Alex: 90% or otherwise, it’s much easier on my eyes, anyway

    Danno: i can’t speak from experience, not having used it much, but at least when i operate within the context of the terminal window colors on black has been much less strain inducing.

    Fraxas: amen, sir, amen. make things easy and attractive, and you’re off to a good start.

    Edward: i suspect you’re right – Cote, for one, is an emacs user with a unique color scheme.

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