there are lots of emacs colorschemes out there, and I'll be reviewing some of them here. stay tuned!
darkfish is the theme that the old ruby documentation used
for highlighting code snippets. I ported it to emacs but
haven't uploaded it to MELPA or anything yet (sorry, I
know you're all terribly disappointed). Aside from the
too-acidic green documentation comments, the colors of
darkfish are low-contrast, but not too low-contrast that
it's no fun (looking at you, zenburn). the use of beige
rather than white as the default color is an especially good
trick. overall, darkfish is very flexible and looks decent
in most cases.
tsdh-light is one of the default themes that come with emacs.
it was made with a very good understanding of
light themes, because it has lots of different colors
while still remaining low-contrast. of course, this means
it doesn't look too great if your eyes aren't adjusted.
leuven is a default theme like tsdh-light, but it's notably
more high-contrast. interestingly enough, it puts a lot less
emphasis on preprocesser-style declarations than tsdh-light.
if you don't use this theme in the right lighting environment,
it will hurt your eyes!
I absolutely love this theme for its simplicity; so
long as my eyes don't absolutely need a dark theme, this
one will work almost any time. it keeps code mostly black,
while strings and comments have a subtle pastel highlight
and keywords are colored a neutral but strong shade of blue.
no matter what mood I'm in, the coloration of this theme
always looks good, and its attention to larger structural
elements rather than little details gives it an edge over
the other themes.