I don't get why people like Solarized. It's way too low contrast in every dimension for my particular flavour of colour blindness. Maybe it's just a particularly pessimal colour scheme for me :(

(Also the designer appears to have based one of the key colour choices on his memories of almost drowning to death as a child. http://www.metafilter.com/102504/Solarized#3636286)

Oh but I'm not color blind :)

Also solarized comes with various different "contrast versions" have you tried them all? By the way, what's your choice in color scheme being color blind and all?

I use the Gnome Tango colour scheme http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines where possible.

I find it has good contrast between colours in general. In particular I can actually read the blue it uses on a black background. Most of the colours have good contrast with each other even at extremely low saturation too.

For my vision there are some small tweaks I sometimes make to it but it is generally the most agreeable match to my abnormality I've found in a preset so far.

Personaly I'm in love with Monokai: https://twitter.com/#!/ciembor/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitt.... But I think even the most beloved themes bores after some time:).

Ohhh boy you brought back memories of Textmate for me! I used to use Monokai also. Great color scheme! Loved it until I found a need to have a bit less contrast in my code. For some reason I got so used to the contrast that I only saw stuff in the pink/fushia and my mind completely ignored the rest.