Contrast of the default dark theme is much too low to be usable

[stitch]

Hi team,

I'm trying Zed and find it to be not usable. The main problem, aside from lacking visually strong browsing addressed in issue #8661, is that the dark theme is light-grey on blue-gray. Combine this with a thin font it's just a pain / impossible to use.

Looking at the settings, there is no hint on what themes are available and there might be one that fixes all below problems, but i don't believe so as it's not easy to find. (there is no link to the themes page next to the theme config... or a list of available themes... so discovery of this option is abysmal).

I'm reading that there are all kinds of settings and options possible and i might even roll my own theme. But that is work that is required for basically everyone that has some kind of visual impairment. Even me, without any visual impairment (knock on wood), has a challenge to find anything in zed and it's just asking twice as much effort as in other IDE's.

To clarify my point: here you can see the difference between pycharm and zed:

Most notably zed falls short on:

• contrast: light-gray on blue-gray instead of white on very dark gray
• font boldness: a thin font versus a bold font
• spacing: zed needs a much more space per item which require much more scrolling / scrolling with the eyes, while using even smaller icons (without distinguishing colors) so nothing is really recognizable or stands out.
• minimalism: there is a bunch of lines before every item which is super distracting and causes shimmer
• different icon for open and closed folders make closed folders look like they cannot be opened
• visual action queues: a micro-folder icon is much less understandable than a chevron before a folder icon (issue 8661)

Hope this can be used to improve the default dark mode of Zed.

I was looking forward to the speed of Zed

Regards,
Elger / Stitch