Angry Fruit Salad

This term was coined when color terminals/monitors (especially on PCs running MS-DOS) were becoming more pervasive. Common systems allowed for a fixed palette of 16 colors with a very high saturation. When software started to use the colors (and ANSI.SYS became a thing) the common focus was to give all different elements a different color. (This notion is maintaned today by Emacs' font-lock-mode and other syntax highlighting variants.) The result was a wild mix of red, green yellow, white, black and blue - almost like in a fruit salad - that might easily hurt your eyes .

While the very first versions of Windows sufferd the same issues with the palette , GUIs in general don't expose the same problem and don't put too many high-contrast-colors all over the screen.

"Wow! This Midnight Commander theme is some piece of angry fruit salad."

"Let's avoid angry-fruit-salad-syndrome and use the solarized syntax highlighting theme."