![]() He announced the release of Solarized on the Vim mailing list soon after, the project hit the front page of the online community Hacker News. "I believe in open source software, I believe in giving something special to the world that anyone can use."Īlthough he'd tested the color scheme in a variety of applications, Schoonover initially released themes for only a few tools he used in his own work, like the code editor Vim and the text-based email client Mutt. "It would kill something special about it, taint it," he says. He says he never intended to commercialize it. Schoonover released Solarized for free in April 2011 on GitHub, a code-hosting platform and collaboration service. "I didn't trust myself to come up with a palette that was balanced and looked good both in a dark and light medium," he says. Bir likes Solarized so much he uses it as the color scheme for his computer-generated art. "If I bring up a terminal window that doesn't have Solarized, I feel out of place I don't feel at home," says Zachery Bir, a Richmond, Virginia, programmer and artist who has been using Solarized since shortly after it was released in 2011. Microsoft even bundled it with its popular code editor VS Code. It’s available for every major code editor and many other programming tools. ![]() ![]() The design is free and open source, so there’s no tally of purchases. It's hard to say how many programmers use it. While hunting for tools after switching from a Mac to Windows, I started to see Solarized Dark and its sibling Solarized Light, which uses the same 16-color palette, practically everywhere I looked. I'm not a coder by trade, but I like to use code editors for writing and organizing notes. Staring at screens all day can make you particular about fonts and colors. But I soon found that I couldn't work with any other color scheme. To be honest, I didn't think much of Solarized at first. The colors were part of a theme called Solarized Dark for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson.
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