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Episode 0.7.7 - Solarized and Linux on the desktop with Ethan Schoonover:

Wynn sat down with Ethan Schoonover, creator of Solarized to talk about the science and design behind the wildly popular color scheme as well as his love for Arch Linux.

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Items mentioned in the show:

• Ethan Schoonover is a freelance designer, creator of Solarized.


• Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications.


• Vimscript can be intimidating for noobs.


• The Solarized palette aims to maximize sixteen colors, providing contrast on both dark and light backgrounds
  


• Ethan works in the CIELAB:

A Lab color space is a color-opponent space with dimension L for lightness and a and b for the color-opponent dimensions, based on nonlinearly compressed CIE XYZ color space coordinates.

• Achievement unlocked: First guest to mention fovea centralis on the show.


• “This fellow Wright” is W. David Wright, who experimented with color perception in 1930s.


• Ethan works out of the LAB space, mapping to other color spaces as tools require.


• Solarized looks great in a number of fonts as well as syntaxes.


• Wynn asks if Sass should support LAB.


• Terminus is Ethan’s favorite fixed with font, but also likes Letter Gothic Mono.


• Wynn’s litmus test for fixed fonts is the dashrocket alignment.


• Micah Rich, founder of The League of Movable Type was on Episode 0.7.4.


• Arch Linux is Ethan’s favorite Linux distro.


• xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell.


• The tmux reference on the Arch wiki is most helpful. Check out Episode 0.7.3 for more on tmux.


• TotalTerminal from the talented Antonin Hildebrand.


• brew tap makes it easy to tap a new Homebrew formula repository from GitHub, or list existing taps.


• Freshmeat.net is now freecode.com.


• GIMP is no Photoshop replacement.


• Haskell is an advanced, purely-functional programming language.


• XMonad.Prompt.Input is similar to Quicksilver.


• Karthik’s terminal convinced Wynn to give Solarized a go.


• Wynn figured out how to do ‘transparent’ colors in the tmux status bar.


• TaskWarrior is Ethan’s todo manager, which is saying something since he created Kinkless GTD.


• Drew Neil, creator of Vimcasts, featured on Episode 0.5.6.


• Dr. Nic Williams, on Episode 0.5.0.

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