I’m just inverting the screen (built-in accessibility feature in OS X, there probably are alternatives on other platforms). Vim and the terminal are set to a light scheme, one of the standard ones. When I switch to terminal screen and it’s low light, I hit a key combo and it inverts everything. Does the job for me.
I do this, too, and it works very well. Specifically, almost everything on my screen is very light-colored (exception: when I am recreating rather than working) and then when I am working at night I use OS X to "invert" all the colors on the screen, with the result that the color 0x000000 becomes 0xFFFFFF, 0x000001 becomes 0xFFFFFE, etc.
If you have access to an OS X environment, you can try out "invert colors" at System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. iOS has it, too.
Yep! Also when I don’t want colored output (e.g. when working on familiar codebases or often in the shell), I turn on the Grayscale option in addition to inverted colors. That gives the screen cool retro-futuristic feel, and IMO makes it more aesthetically pleasing. Too bad a shortcut can’t be assigned to this one, but typing "pref access" in Spotlight gets the relevant settings page.
As a related tip, on iOS you can have a home button triple-press shortcut which you can assign inverted colors or grayscale, or both. Was stoked when discovered that.
