It's not real secret that I'm red-green colorblind. It's not really a major life obstacle: I've got a wardrobe of clothes in colors that I can easily tell apart, I have developed a number of heuristics for guessing colors that are right enough, and mostly it just creates funny stories where I get a confused look if I try to describe something that might be purple, or have to convince a coworker into reading a graph for me.
One challenge historically, however, has been various kinds of text editing color themes: so often they end up having some kind of low contrast situation that's hard to read, or two different aspects of code that should be highlighted differently but aren't. I've tried lots of themes out, and I would always end up just going back and using default emacs themes, which might not have been great, but I always found it useable.
Until Protesilaos Stavrou's Modus Themes, that is.
These are super compelling and I never really knew how good an editor could look until I started using it. Like is this what it's really like for the rest of you all the time? Things are clear: I never get confused between type names and function names any more. There are rarely situations where I feel like the highlighting color and text color are the same, which used to happen all the time.
The real win, I think, is that Modus' makes dark themes accessible to me, in a way that they never were before. For the most part "dark themes" which have been so popular recently, are just impossible to see clearly (for me), I also find that it's less taxing to spend time in front of screens when darker backgrounds, so being able to spend most of my time doing work in an environment that's easy to read. I tend to keep to light backgrounds when using a laptop and dark backgrounds otherwise.
The second piece is that, I think I've caved in and decided to increase the size of the font, by default in my text editor, at least when I'm using my desktop/external monitor. I think my vision is as good as it's been, though I should probably get that checked out post-pandemic. I think there's a balance between "small fonts let you see more of the file you're working on," and "larger fonts let you focus on the area that you're editing." When I'm writing English, the focus is great, and when writing software I tend to want more context. There's a balance also in wanting to keep an entire line length viable at once, and an ideal words-per-line limit for text that's useful for making things easier to read. So there's some tuning there, depending on what your workload looks like.
I guess if there is any lesson in this it's that: Comfort matters, and you shouldn't push yourself into uncomfortable display situations if you can.