For me: black background with no transparency and white text (with colorizing here and there depending on the app)...

-Chris

Black background with just a bit of transparency (maybe 80% opaque), and the text is just a shade off white, except where it isn't. The transparency gives me the motivation to keep my desktop a wee bit more clean than I otherwise would.

White background with black text for me. My crappy LCD monitor hurts my eyes otherwise.

Black background with color whenever possible.

same, and colorize ls and grep

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If it ain't broke, you didn't tweak it enough. If it is broke, use more duct tape.
http://independentchaos.com

Black bg with 70% opacity, white text. Colors for only a few things like "ls".

...and vim/ls syntax and colourization on.

I am a deviant. I use black text on a white background. My font is "ProFont" set to be 5 x 7 pixels high. Some terminals have a "tint" to the white to distinguish them. For example, log windows have a green tint while consoles have a red tint.

But, my general purpose terminal is a 90 x 50 black-on-white window.

Of course, this is the best possible combination.

I'm with Yaakov, although instead of pure white, I use a slight yellow; lower contrast, and easier to read.

One day, long ago, I discovered the "blue" mode in Microsoft Word. You know what I'm talking about -- high-contrast readability or whatever they call it, with white text on blue paper.

My eyes don't get tired as quickly looking at white on a very deep blue. I haven't taken the hour or so to tweak everything in every terminal, but I do use MiscFixedB613 with white on black currently. I'm itching to switch back to deep blue. I also have transparency on at the moment, but I forget why.

Now that I've posted this, my productivity's shot for the day because I'm gonna go tweak.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Jed:

I used white-on-blue for *years* in DOS windows but as the resolution and brightness of monitors increased I switched to black-on-white. I know that people complain about eye fatigue but for whatever reason, I don't have that trouble.

Sometimes I like to hit Command-Option-Control-8 to get an "easier to read" screen if the light is bad or my eyes simply won't focus.

I use black background with mostly white text and a colorized prompt so that I can find it easily in a sea of text.

I also use a little bit of transparency. It helps me out visually although I cannot pin point in what way. I just know I prefer it.

Heh, that's the colour scheme I used to use 20-odd years ago in ProComm (terminal emulator) back when my access was limited to X25 connections via PADs.

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)