Solarized

I've received several emails asking me about my love of Ethan Schoonover's Solarized color scheme. Solarized is a set of colors Ethan selected for use in a text editor or app development platform.. Computer programmers spend a lot of time gazing at computer screens and Ethan thought it would be a good idea to package up a pleasant and complimentary set of colors for the purpose. While I don't spend much time programing computers, I sure spend a lot of time looking at screens and I've been using the Solarized colors set for years. I've got no training on picking colors and I'm happy to take advantage of Ethan's generosity here.

The download file has the colors in several formats including Adobe Photoshop, Xcode, BBEdit, and even Vim. (Yes, Vim. I really like the way it works with the Apple Color picker. Here's how you install it.

First download the file from Ethan's site.

When you open the file, you'll see there are a lot of places to install Solarized.

I opened up the Apple color picker folder. Inside there is a script to launch the color picker. Fire it up.

Click on the palette and then open. Then select the 'Solarized.clr' file and you're in business.