Decreasing contrast: taking the bright out of white background

Question

I recently got a new app called Maple 12 whose window background is bright white, and there are no options for changing its color. Some other native Mac apps, such as Finder, have the same thing, also without apparent provision for modification. Since the nature of Maple (a computer algebra system) is such that one generally spends a lot of time concentrating on the window contents, I find that the high-contrast stark white begins to hurt my eyes after half an hour or so, making it hard to distinguish the foreground text. My age (69) probably aggravates this.
In almost all the other apps I use I've been able to arrange the background to be something less contrasty, such as a light gray, or at least a soft white instead of the bright white. I asked Maplesoft Support about changing this, but they informed me that Maple's background is controlled by the OS, presumably using the same default that Finder uses.
Nothing I've tried so far has helped. There are ways to increase contrast (the opposite of what I need), of getting a negative of everything, and of modifying the profile of all colors and shades in between the extremes of pure black and pure white. But those extremes always remain unaffected. Since OS X is Unix based it seems likely to me that there might be some way to modify this, possibly by a command-line Unix command, if only I knew the correct incantation.
Does anyone here have any suggestions about how I might be able to make the background more tolerable? I wouldn't mind if every instance of bright white were changed to soft white.

Answer 1

Thanks much for this helpful comment. It did indeed let me change the TextEdit background - and I suspect the same approach will work with some other apps as well.
Unfortunately, Maple isn't one of them. I went thru all the Maple menu tabs and options, and while there are many for modifying the text - its color, size, etc. - there are none whatever for affecting the background. So it seems as tho it is Maple that is simply lacking a capability that can be built in (how easily, I don't know).
In eComStation (the current incarnation of OS/2 Warp) one can often simply bring up the color pallette, pick a color, and drag it to another app's window to set the background. That doesn't seem to be possible on OS X, even tho it obviously has the machinery for it.
I want to suggest to Maplesoft to add the background choice capability, but that would probably be better received if I can suggest to them how to accomplish it. Since I'm not a developer and know nothing about OS X's internals, I'm unable to do that. If anyone has any ideas on this score, or can point me to relevant information, I would much appreciate it.
- Dushan