I think the rise of dark mode is mostly related to really good displays. Dark mode looks like shit on CRTs and even older flat panels with poor contrast.
Neat tidbit that I learned while working on dark mode at my company. Don't use true black. It looks amazing on OLED screens at rest but it results in a weird sluggish appearance when scrolling. This is because there is a lag time between pixels going from off to on.
They do sadly, which is why you wanna keep them off, or I suppose burn them all out at the same rate. I know my OLED TV actually does a burn-in balancing once I turn it off.
An OLED and a dark default would probably also reduce insomnia.
I don't know about you guys, but Night Shift at max setting is still too blue for me. I end up turning the brightness down. I just need to switch to dark.
I definitely agree. I was thinking this the other day when thinking about how 'white' must have felt like 'paper' back in the day. Also, the issue WRT dark not really being dark.
You're right that without LCDs , especially OLED, dark mode wouldn't really be a thing.
I used to dislike dark backgrounds, but now I have several apps set to dark mode. But going way back to the 80s, terminals were mostly dark mode. CRTs mostly looked terrible with bright backgrounds until the Mac.
I don't know if my own change in preference is due to underlying change in screen technology, or something else. Screen time might affect it too -- maybe people prefer light mode when they're only on-screen a few hours a day, but dark mode is better when using it all day?
I suspect a lot of that happened because people started adding color when color monitors became a more common option, and blue being the least offensive of the alternatives available if you wanted to add a background color...
I think about the default IRIX UIs from the mid-90s[1, 2]. These were embraced by a professional subset of users that likely paid attention to detail and wanted minimal distraction from their work, however subtle it might be.
Dark UIs likely made ghosting more prominent on CRTs, either because of crosstalk on a D-SUB cable or because of "spillover" of bright elements of a UI into a nearby dark field. I agree with your sentiment that technological change has made this possible.
Tangentially, I wanted to mention a hue shift that I've noticed that that all UIs seem to flow through. I will take the evolution of Aqua for example. UIs seem to start off with some variant of lighter blue or green (10.0) that eventually iterates into a darker but more saturated form of itself (10.4). Eventually, we start getting hints of purple (10.5, 10.6). When purple starts to come through, there are really no colours to introduce and designers usually decide it's time for a UI overhaul. I would love to hear others' takes on this.
If you had a low-resolution display with visible scan lines, as most text terminals did, then you had a stripy light background, which was pretty bad. But a high-resolution gapless display on a reasonably adjusted CRT was great.
Light modes were arguably worse on CRTs, especially if the refresh was 60Hz or less. I couldn't take Word for Windows at all seriously until Windows NT and 85Hz CRTs appeared.
I currently use both light and dark themes on Emacs, with a shortcut to toggle between them. Solarised is a great theme for this, as the text colours are the same for both modes. I originally started using a light theme during the day, as so many other apps already do and I disliked the sudden change in brightness when for example switching between Emacs and a web browser.
> Dark mode looks like shit on CRTs and even older flat panels with poor contrast.
I think you got it backwards. I remember using black backgrounds and things like "mc -b" specifically because CRTs I used sucked at light colors, trinitron displays later were nicer though and using white backgrounds was pleasant. Nowadays led backlit displays suck again on light and bright colors and don't seem to improve, hence "dark mode" became a solution.
Yeah I was going to mention that. Devs usually have Mac Books, XPS, X1 Carbons, modern screens blasting 500 nits. Most real people have sh8tty TN panels or old small monitors.
CRTs had way better contrast and brightness than the early LCDs. And since CRTs don't excite phosphors on black pixels you could literally extend the life of your monitor (and spare your eyeballs) by using dark mode.
OTOH, nowadays most displays are glary and dark mode in a non-dark environment lets these display act as a mirror. As a cynic I assume we live in a time of narcissistic personality disorder ;)
With the bright mode I can reduce the brightness of my screens and I can still read everything. I also never have the urge to put dark-mode code on presentation slides that are unreadable in all but perfect condition.
95% of what people? I know people of both persuasions in about equal numbers, which makes me question the 95% number. Personally I hate dark mode except late at night as staring at a dark screen and then walking away from my desk makes me dizzy.
It seems that their data is mostly coming from their own user base (the discord data is biased as they admitted), which is mostly comprised of programmers and other techies. I don't know how far this generalizes to the rest of society.
I personally like dark mode during night time, but almost always prefer light mode by default. There's just something about dark mode that is... gloomy and depressing. It feels like an overcast day, whereas light mode feels like a bright sunny day. I've noticed that most techies do prefer dark mode, and I also recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls - I wonder if there's a correlation there. I suspect though that this preference is reversed for the general population.
Thanks. I tried to find more data but it's scarce. I would love to get more data for more apps as I think it's definitely biased around people who spend a LOT of time staring at text.
I'm a programmer so spend a ton of time in my IDE. Polar is designed for people that read a LOT so dark mode really matters to them.
When you're reading 100s of PDFs having a dark mode is kind of important!
In retrospect I'm kicking myself not working on this sooner.
I would say you have an interesting article here, and your user poll is interesting too. But like you said you don't really have the data to back up this claim, so it just comes off as really click-baity. It worked, as I've never heard of your product and am clicking around the site now, but it's disappointing none the less.
Well, one of the reasons to blog is to get other people who can submit more data. Further, I feel that if there was a specific demand for white that people would switch.
... It definitely would be great to get more apps to release their data. I reached out to IntelliJ about IDEA data but I didn't hear anything back.
Most of the data that I've found suggests that dark text on a light background is measurably more legible than the reverse. This effect is increased for people with astigmatism -- which is about half the population, so that's not insignificant.
There's a lot of pushback I've seen when studies like that get cited: they're old, they weren't about programmers, etc. And, maybe, but even though we're staring at LCD panels now rather than CRTs, light is light light and vision is vision. It's not about how much light is "shining into your eyes" as much as it is about visual acuity, and it's at least worth trying light mode and just... turning down the brightness on your monitor a little. Also, turning up the ambient light in the room. If your environment is so dark that the backlighting on your keyboard is visible, then you've tacitly designed your environment to make light mode blinding and uncomfortable, so you're not really giving it a fair shake.
I'd like to see studies about whether alternating between dark and light mode occasionally will help prevent your eyes from getting tired as quickly; my suspicion is yes, because it certainly does feel that way to me. But a lot of things that seem intuitively true don't stand up to scrutiny.
I imagine you don't know the answer, but I'm curious as to if these studies were controlled for screen glare.
Dark themes/backgrounds have far worse issues with screen glare from badly configured room lighting than light ones do in my experience.
-----
I'm also curious why another area of design that is extremely concerned with legibility seems to have reached the opposite conclusion, pretty much worldwide.
Road signs.
Even though signs themselves can vary widely, the standard color scheme for road signs in every developed country I can think of, is a darker background with lighter text. I certainly don't have the studies in front of me, but I know a great deal of research has gone into fonts and legibility for road signs, and I presume what we see on the roads in the world is the result.
You are correct, I don't know if they controlled for screen glare. :)
The road signs are an interesting question. I know there's a lot of work, and occasional controversy, over the typefaces used. If I had to hazard a guess for the color choices, though, it might be the signs have to be very visible in the dark, too -- that's now generally done by using reflective paint for the light part of the sign, but older highway signs, at least in America, used reflective dots in the letters. So that might be a tradition born less out of legibility studies than practicality.
My astigmatism gives me doubles in any high contrast situation, whether light on dark or dark on light. Solarized/Zenburn type low-contrast palettes are the only thing that really addresses it.
I've noticed that when my eyes are tired as well. I think well-considered low-contrast color schemes don't get enough love, and I'm still a fan of Solarized, too. (Although my favorite schemes, both light and dark, are Spacemacs'.)
What we really really need is cheap, high resolution, fast refresh eInk displays.
I’m talking 27 inch, 4K resolution, color (even just 4096 colors might be enough for a lot of software development work) monitors running at 60Hz or higher, with eInk technology and backlight that can be dialed all the way from full brightness to no backlight at all, which should be sold at a price somewhere between the same and 2x to 3x or 4x the price of what LED displays of similar size and specs currently cost today.
> It matters when you're staring at a screen for more than 12 hours a day
I stare at a screen for more than 12 hours most days, but I strongly prefer light mode over dark, so I'm not sure the amount of screen time is what makes the difference.
People are different. Some can't handle the light. Some can't see as well in the dark.
As one of the former, I find I am also very sensitive to light at night. Seeing a bright light within an hour or two of bedtime will push the point when I fall asleep back significantly.
If system-wide themes really worked, I'd probably be switching now and then between light and dark themes. Dark mode is kind of gloomy but it's also easier on the eyes.
System wide themes used to work, and we didn't need an explicit Dark Mode because of it. Sadly, computer interfaces have regressed significantly from 1995.
Well, I meant something with more freedom of styling, not just some established light and dark theme. Like change the colors of system-wide buttons, text inputs, window title-bars, tabs, etc. Change the system-wide accenting color to Red, Blue, Green, Gold, etc.
> I've noticed that most techies do prefer dark mode, and I also recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls - I wonder if there's a correlation there.
If I may be mildly unflattering for a moment, I think it's just a trendiness thing. Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something.
If someone has real data showing it actually causes less eyestrain or something, I'm willing to change that opinion.
I'm sure everyone has their own specific reasons. And what you suggest might be true for a subset of individuals. For me, I prefer dark mode for a couple of sight related reasons:
- It makes my eye floaters much harder to notice
- Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones
> Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones
It was (and still is, but read on) for me until I realised that it was not light mode but backlight that was too strong. It was actually initially better with dark modes, low contrast stuff like zenburn, or (solarize light or dark) but only got worse later.
The moment I realised that was a backlight (and ambient light, including temperature) issue I moved back to light mode.
The above mentioned solutions have the nasty side effect that people usually increase backlight, which just makes things even worse!
My biggest problem with my Surface Go is the backlight doesn't go low enough. 100% is brighter than my phone goes and 0% is still feels like looking at 75% on my phone.
I just recently took the LSAT (now administered on Surface Go) and I saw test takers use the "High Contrast" mode in the software much more frequently than I expected.
I usually have my phone at 0% brightness, but that I can still see something is a clear indication it's not actually 0%. The screen is still too bright for me if it's the only light source. Same for audio; I basically only switch between mute and minimum volume because everything above is too loud for me.
I hate that there's no way to acess more fine-grained levels below the arbitrarily imposed minimum. I realize most people would think their phone is broken if they could get it into a state where it doesn't produce any perceivable output despite not being explicitly off. I just wish there were some secret handshake I could use to confirm that I'm okay with having to find the brightness control while not being able to see anything; I already do that when I'm outside in the bright sun.
On my phone running iOS, in addition to the brightness slider there is an option under Settings -> General -> Accessibility Display Accommodations to "Reduce White Point", which I can use to further dim the screen.
I think this is nearly identical to using a dark theme; it doesn't actually reduce the brightness of the backlighting.
I have been wondering for a long time what determines the backlight minimum, why can't we go darker? Surely phones can be expected to be used in pitch black?
Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like it renders a partially transparent overlay to simulate a lower brightness setting. The notification bar remains unaffected, but I guess it's better than nothing.
Low backlight usually implies bad contrast. I hate this, especially with the modern trend for various shades of grey being used and thus being indistinguishable.
same boat here -- migraine / cluster / photophobia sufferer and need to reduce as much as possible the volume and amplitude of light coming into my eye --
in truth, I don't think I'd be able to do my job at all without dark-mode text editors / terminals
White backgrounds make for so much distraction when it comes to eye floaters for me as well.
For me it's nice when I can use a pure black background on an OLED screen and just have that much less light being produced beyond just turning down the brightness on a screen.
Came here to say the same thing- had eye surgery a few years back and the floaters are maddening. I've got a few apps that use a white background feels blinding whenever I have to use them.
Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.
Maybe people who spend most of their working lives alone, staring at screens, are picking dark mode because it's comfortable, not cool. There is no one around to impress. It's ok if you don't get it, but that doesn't mean it's just a fad.
It's cool to be comfortable, and now easier. OLED screens invert the default behavior of a screen from light to dark. It'd be absurd to fight the comfort that this can provide.
I WFH and can have pretty much any setup I want, and I prefer dark on light background. Certain colors are harder for the eye to see (blue is a big offender) and yet, we have UI designers putting blue on a black background. So, I use a lighter color background, dark-ish font color and I have a 15% brown tint on my glasses. Ahhh.. comfort.
Text mode terminals used black background, so did XY displays which used memory tubes. When graphical, bitmapped high resolution displays arrived, they nearly universally were white background with black text - but trivially switchable (starting from late 1970s)
bro you dont need "real data" to convince yourself that water is wet. if you have eyes you can get "empirical data":
go into dark room. read black text on white background. observe how you are squinting and its hard to read. enable dark mode. (you can use something like night mode for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-light-m... if you arent sure how). profit.
Most work areas are not lit well enough. For my own home office I have about 19,000 lumens of light in a relatively modest space. Same brightness as a cloudy day outside. In that environment, a white background is very pleasing to the eye, especially with crisp displays.
One advantage of dark backgrounds is that it's easier to distinguish many colors against something dark, so for code that uses heavy syntax highlighting, it looks nicer. But the edges of characters render better against white backgrounds, so it's a tradeoff...
One area where dark mode shines is if the environment doesn't allow for ambient light, such as checking the phone or laptop when someone is sleeping in the room.
For some people with astigmatism this is a worst case scenario. As you try and read a light font on a dark background in a dark room, the pupil opens up, letting more light in, however opening up the pupil this way exacerbates the effect of the deformed cornea.
I also work through the dark hours the night. Switching between bright white terminal/app/ide to pitch black, as I do every night, is jarring and, again, gives me headaches. Dark mode should be an option just like every site should be accessible to any assistive technology.
Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (DOS and UNIX). This applies to screens in well lit environments though, which would explain the rise of the dark mode in recent years: Smartphones in bed. But there it's more about the "less bad" solution.
The key part is having a well lit environment, so that the white background of the screen roughly matches the overall brightness of the surroundings. This way the pupils don't have to adjust all the time when looking around your room and then back at your screen, or when looking at code where the screen is mostly black with some text, and then some article with images.
In netscape the default background colour used to be black on light grey. I find that much easier on my eyes than black on white. Even a light yellow with dark green text. But given a dark room I like to switch the other way. See how you feel with a terminal/editor in different colour schemes. So bright room, bright scheme, dark room dark scheme. What I can't stand is flipping between the two modes. At night on a phone, some apps are incredibly painful to read. Even darkish flavours can be ruined with bright splash screens. There's just no consistency here.
I think the switch to black-on-white when GUIs first appeared was largely because the prototypical application was a word processor, where the selling point was that what you saw on the screen looked like what you were going to print on paper.
Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length units, but were usually based on some fixed notional dpi rather than matching the size on the physical screen).
I suspect it's more about high refresh rate CRTs. On low refresh rate, blocks of colour really were very unpleasant to look at, but this went away over about 70hz. Of course, this was never an issue on LCDs.
There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.
I'm another for dark mode. I've been doing it for years when it's been available and I switched my phone because my previous one didn't have it. Even with the backlight cranked all the way down it was physically painful to look at. Others have suggested turning up the lights, well you can't do this in vehicles driving at night. It's also difficult if you're sharing a room with someone. I suspect I may be outside the range of normal people as going outside without sunglasses isn't a pleasant experience for me and I've got added sensitivity due to chemo. I do happen to be night owl normally not sure if that really matters or correlates to anything. I don't have the same problem with books, just items with backlighting.
It's a matter of practice. I find light backgrounds unbearable in thr nails on chalkboards sense. After looking at one the rest of the environment looks dark and off. I can't make the backlight dim enough for them to be comfortable. With dark backgrounds and light text, I feel the device to be a more natural part of the surroundings. It's not glowing nearly as much and is emitting only the light that's needed to communicate the information I need.
If you are talking about research based on modern oled devices then I'd love to read it. Maybe I'm weird.
This is not true. If you are in a room at night with all the lights off and the only source of light is your computer screen, you want as little amount of light coming out of that screen as possible to reduce that contrast ratio between the computer screen and the ambient darkness. The only exception is res light due to the way the eye works. White backgrounds, which consist of all the red green and blue pixels, add more strain onto the eyes due to giving off more light. Given equal backlight, white backgrounds give off more light than black.
In fact the single greatest thing that computer manufacturers could do to improve the lives of night-time workers and people who use their computers with the lights off would be to switch to OLED screens, where the black pixels do not use backlight. As someone who studies human vision, I took special note of the improvement when I switched to a phone that uses an OLED screen in dark mode. There, with white on black text, the white text is the only thing in the room giving off light and it’s a drastic improvement.
However if the colors do not matter (you can deal with monochrome text and images), then using a true “red mode” will produce the least eye strain. Check out F.Lux’s “darkroom” color effect. You’ll feel the difference instantly. You’ll be able to comfortably see what’s on the screen in the dark with the screen as the only light source, as well as be able to quickly scan around the room without your eyes needing to adjust! You can even turn up the brightness much higher than you can without it.
I kinda like dark mode on darker days, but if I'm jumping from the IDE to a light webpage like this one every few seconds, then a light IDE is much better.
> Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something.
I suspect this is a big part of it. The interesting thing is, terminal emulators flipped to light backgrounds when it became practical (for instance, see the Solaris X11 one, or, later, Apple's one). The reversion to white on dark was a later thing.
I'm inclined to blame Microsoft; their Windows terminal emulator never went dark on light (though, interestingly, their bundled telnet and modem clients did). I think they were afraid of breaking DOS software that made assumptions about the black background.
Generally early GUI systems were black-on-white monochromatic, but switchable (and easily so, for the whole system). The thing is, which one is really better depended a lot on personal preference AND ambient light - and original systems supported both, but often assumed brightly lit room.
I like dark mode for simple practical reasons: I have a multimonitor setup and I hate it when a monitor shines bright light into my eyes from the side — this is of course purely subjective. I also work a lot with colors and I’d like to avoid bright colors on secondary displays for that reason as well.
There are studies linking the high blue light content of LEDs to health issues regarding eyesight and sleep. AFAIK the eyesight thing has only be tested with mice, but conduct your own research.
I use dark wallpapers for years now, and just yesterday when I wanted to try a brighter one for a change I instantly changed it back because the bright shine was so annoying.
I'd definitely take the Discord data with a heap of salt: I prefer light themes, but I use dark in Discord because Discord's light theme is terrible and hurts my eyes.
Discord has one of the worst light modes I've ever seen. Until recently, the sidebar taking up 20% of your screen on the left didn't even change colors, it remained in dark mode regardless of if you swapped. Also note that the role colors most servers assign contrast way too poorly with light background (bright yellow on white). And dark mode is the default. Worst example to try to extrapolate from.
> I recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls
A "night owl" is someone who enjoys being awake and active at night more than the average person, but most people who describe themselves as "night owls" still spend most of their waking hours during the day, especially when they are working, especially if they work in software development at a normal 9-5 job.
I haven't read the article but the Discord light mode is TERRIBLE. Terrible contrast and half the interface remains in dark mode. That's why I don't use it. Otherwise I would. So it's kinda forced dark mode for Discord. That stat can not be trusted.
Need better evidence to believe this stat too but I do prefer the dark mode personally. For what it's worth, I've been running the dark mode on my site for almost 3 weeks now. 60,000+ visitors since the change and no complaints for now.
I wish HN would get a dark mode, and I don’t know why major apps like WhatsApp etc. are still dragging their asses over dark mode support while smaller apps with more complex UIs have already supported it for months.
Maybe because the small apps have a very targeted audience that enjoys dark mode. If you ask 10 random people on the street only 1 will probably know what “dark mode” is or would think about actively switching to it.
There are plenty of user-written styles that will give you a dark HN. I'm using this one [1] right now, using Stylus[2] (Chrome extension) to apply it.
You can use the Dark Reader extension for Firefox on computers & Android, which makes all sites dark, or the Stylus extension which allows you to load custom site-specific stylesheets. Stylus allows access to a big repository of community-made themes and there are surely some dark ones for HN.
this is frustrating because I have diplopia and so my life looks like: https://i.imgur.com/IHWBflS.png when you have white text on a black background. This affect doesn't happen on "light" mode systems...
I just switched back and forth from vi in my terminal to that image a couple of times. I see the blurring on that image immediately, every time. I don't see anything like that on the terminal.
While I also prefer dark mode overall, the majority of dark editor color schemes strain my eyes more than light ones. Primarily this is because they use really bright saturated colors or solid white text on dark backgrounds, which makes my eyes strain as if they are looking at LED headlights during a night drive. OS X uses nice muted yet distinct colors on both ends of the brightness spectrum. I wish I could find an IntelliJ theme that matches the same spirit.
I used grey on black for many years but recently switched to pure white. It is much easier to read.
I have my monitors set fairly dim, about 120cd/m^2. This is what most colorspaces expect the whitepoint to be, but it is very dim compared to the maximum amount of light a monitor can put out. It is about 12/100 on my monitor.
Anyway, my point here is that #ffffff is not any sort of color you can see, merely a number that represents the maximum possible amount of red, green, and blue. If that's too much light, you can turn it down. You can also play with gamma curves to change the relative intensities down to pure black. Some people use 2.2 in dark rooms and 2.4 for "normal" indoor illumination.
That's why I try to use the Solarized theme basically everywhere. It focuses on low contrast, and that works well enough that I can also handle the light variant without problems. Both black on white and white on black are horrible in my opinion.
Personally I can't stand dark mode. It literally hurts my eyes. Strain after a few moments and interlacing ghost lines that linger in my vision for a minute.
Does anyone else have this?
Is it brain cancer?!
edit: Thanks, I'm pretty sure it's not cancer.
Question: But why me? Age? Staring too long at monitors? Drugs? It doesn't seem to effect too many others.
Dark mode can cause strain on eyes. Lower total brightness means your pupils open up to be able to take in more light. Wider pupils means lower depth of field, i.e. less stuff in focus immediately in front of/behind whatever you are currently focused on. You are more susceptible to having to refocus from subtle movements with a lower depth of field. The less of a steady state your focus, the more the muscles involved in focusing are engaged, which might be a cause of the strain you are feeling.
Similarly, this is why your eyes can hurt while reading in dimmer settings. It's not because low light itself is somehow harmful while reading, but because your eyes have a harder time staying focused as you naturally move while reading.
edit: I adopted light themes everywhere after reading this, probably https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/53268 . Knowing depth of field from photography helped this make sense, as well as understanding (from conversations with a doctor in my family) that the generic feeling "strain" is most likely associated with muscle activity than anything else.
I use dark mode with large text for this reason. It's definitely true that you can read smaller text with light backgrounds, but the comfort is higher for me with less light from the screen, so I'm ok with less info on the screen and dark background.
Astigmatism, possibly? IIRC, dark mode is worse for most users (though they may not notice it, and the placebo effect is powerful in this sort of subjective rating) but it's particularly bad for people with severe astigmatism.
I don't know many people my age who can still handle dark mode.
It was easy for me many years ago. I looked at command lines all day and no problem.
Now I see blurry lines for 10 minutes all around me if I have to spend any length of time in a command line interface, or look at an article in dark mode.
This is, unfortunately, an accessibility issue, not a design issue.
I'd say this is why we need software to respect accessibility and configurability. We didn't need "Dark Mode" in Windows 95 because we could configure the crap out of our native widgets. Then using the web as an application platform became a thing, accessibility was jettisoned in the name of "muh design!" and all personal computing has suffered for it.
Dark mode toggles in applications and websites is kind of new (not really, but it's been popularized recently), but system-wide theming with dark themes has been around for a long time.
Dark modes are a lot easier on the eyes if you spend a lot of time infront of screens and to greater and lesser extent everybody spends lots of time infront of screens nowadays.
That being said, I have pretty good luck with browser plugins that auto dark mode websites reasonably well. I'm not sure I'd go redesigning the entire web with darkmodes in mind when plugins can do a good enough job.
> Dark modes are a lot easier on the eyes if you spend a lot of time infront of screens
[citation needed]. Why do people keep making these general statements. Every time they do counter-examples immediately appear in replies. Why can't we all agree that we're all different and it's largely a matter of preference.
I wouldn't be so sure, I used dark mode winamp and litestep themes back in the winxp days. It could have originally been that crt white was not that nice, but I still find a largely white lcd screen a bit much.
I have using VI for years now and I prefer black background with green text, and I'm sure most people do. When I transitioned over to a modern IDE Atom/Code/Sublime, the first thing I wanted was to have a decent dark theme. I did try few of them but it was hard on my eyes(maybe because my eyes have adjusted to what I have been looking at for years)
I finally settled on Code editor and its been ok so far.
It makes web pages like HN dark (in FF). I don't get why it takes so long to do it though, so toggling it is frustrating, and the side effects are pretty horrific as it throws boxes around everything.
The problem is, that many of the developers are mistaking the Dark Mode with BLACK MODE (like Opera GX, Telegram's night mode, Android's [MIUI's] dark theme, and similar themed applications). Dark mode - as with Discord - is really about having the contrast _reduced_ and overall making the whole experience more dark greyish, which reduces strain on the eyes. Try this with BLACK instead, and you'll start to cry after a couple of minutes (yes, I know, I'm old and grumpy..). The very popular dark themes, like Monokai are popular exactly because they respect these very simple rules: 1. dark does NOT mean black, 2. reduce overall contrast.
I personally HATE the fact, that with Opera GX for example, you don't even have the _ability_ to choose if you would like to use the dark mode (which is BLACK MODE).
In the old days, apps simply used the system color scheme. That allowed one to globally choose what they wanted. Now everyone has to implement light and dark “skinz.” Color me not impressed.
Users also expect prettier designs than the standard GUI widgets from the OS nowadays. Custom themes also could lead to ugly visuals in apps and accessibility problems.
Not really. Designers expect prettier designs than standard GUI widgets, I'm not convinced users have ever wanted non-standard widgets. In fact, more than a decade of bitching-about-java has taught me that users hate non-native widgets. But hey, developers love them so fuck users.
Native widgets play significantly better with all accessibility tools, in part because native widgets are so customizable. You didn't need bespoke "Dark Mode" that was some designer's wet dream of what an interface should look like, you could just customize your widgets for what you needed: https://66.media.tumblr.com/19cb7fe3e0eef36debbd0167d6e6e0ea...
Do they though? I've had several family members buy Windows 10 PCs and they specifically requested I 'install Windows XP on it' (install Classic shell + a few other utilities to make the shell look more like Luna or Aero depending on the requestor)
I'd say users expect things to look like what they are used to, whatever that user-specific preference is.
The problem is, that many of the developers are mistaking the Dark mode with BLACK mode (like Opera GX, Telegram's night mode, Android's [MIUI's] dark theme, and similar themed applications). Dark mode - as with Discord - is really about having the contrast _reduced_ and overall making the whole experience more dark greyish, which reduces strain on the eyes. Try this with BLACK instead, and you'll start to cry after a couple of minutes (yes, I know, I'm old and grumpy..). The very popular dark themes, like Monokai are popular exactly because they respect these very simple rules: 1. dark does NOT mean black, 2. reduce overall contrast.
I personally HATE the fact, that with Opera GX for example, you don't even have the _ability_ to choose if you would like to use the Dark mode (which is, again, BLACK mode in reality).
Contrast can stay, for me "dark mode" or 'night theme' is about reducing the overall luminous intensity.
My own belief is that when a sea of white is removed the need for 'crisp black' to stand out against it is also reduced; this might relate to a different perceived contrast due to the lowered noise floor (far less photons being rejected, so it's easier to pick out the desired ones).
At least some of us prefer a Dark mode that especially uses real black in backgrounds because of OLED and other HDR screens. Real black on many OLED devices is an entirely unlit pixel. That's very plainly less light being forced at your eyes from that screen, and absolutely will reduce certain forms of eye strain. Black backgrounds literally fade into the background of the screen. Grays and dark grays don't do that, they need at least a little lighting.
As with almost all aesthetic preferences, your mileage and your hardware may vary.
I'm definitely in the camp that light / dark mode should match the time of day or ambient light level. I love having "light mode" in the morning, but at night I always prefer dark mode. But this is because I have a huge amount of ambient light in the room in the day, and at night I have none. Dark mode is unreadable to me when the bright sun is shining on a monitor. Not so with light mode.
I find default dark mode all of the day super depressing but later at night I find it easier to use with the lights out. So the balance iOS uses for auto enabling dark mode to me is pretty good. It would be nice if more websites would allow me to use it but at least reader mode supports it.
No, you are not. :) People have been looking at dark words on white paper for quite a while now with no ill effects, and I’ve never felt an inclination to invert the relationship. Even in 1980 I preferred the very few CRT terminals that operated in “light mode”.
As long as there's a choice between dark and light mode I'm happy. Heck I don't even really need a customizable interface color setup anymore, I've given up on that.
IMHO "Hot Dog Stand" on Windows 3.1 was the best it could ever be. Dear god don't let Hot Dog Stand be the default.
Can someone post some links to studies? I remember reading that your screen brightness should be close to the ambient light level, and it does help my eyes when I do that adjustment, but I don't know why. White screen = brighter screen, so dark screens at night would make a less-bright screen, and vice versa, which seems to back up the theory.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadBlack looks much better on mobile IMO ...
The material team at Google made a blog post about it which I recommend going through: https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html
The quote around the OLED: "On OLED screens, turning pixels on and off can cause a delay when the screen is scrolled, making the pixels blur."
As an example, the facebook messenger app uses a true black background and the delay is _very_ noticeable.
I don't know about you guys, but Night Shift at max setting is still too blue for me. I end up turning the brightness down. I just need to switch to dark.
You're right that without LCDs , especially OLED, dark mode wouldn't really be a thing.
I don't know if my own change in preference is due to underlying change in screen technology, or something else. Screen time might affect it too -- maybe people prefer light mode when they're only on-screen a few hours a day, but dark mode is better when using it all day?
Dark UIs likely made ghosting more prominent on CRTs, either because of crosstalk on a D-SUB cable or because of "spillover" of bright elements of a UI into a nearby dark field. I agree with your sentiment that technological change has made this possible.
Tangentially, I wanted to mention a hue shift that I've noticed that that all UIs seem to flow through. I will take the evolution of Aqua for example. UIs seem to start off with some variant of lighter blue or green (10.0) that eventually iterates into a darker but more saturated form of itself (10.4). Eventually, we start getting hints of purple (10.5, 10.6). When purple starts to come through, there are really no colours to introduce and designers usually decide it's time for a UI overhaul. I would love to hear others' takes on this.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Lzlbyp9.jpg [2] http://retronet.altervista.org/retronet/ss/ss_irix_shake.png
I currently use both light and dark themes on Emacs, with a shortcut to toggle between them. Solarised is a great theme for this, as the text colours are the same for both modes. I originally started using a light theme during the day, as so many other apps already do and I disliked the sudden change in brightness when for example switching between Emacs and a web browser.
I think you got it backwards. I remember using black backgrounds and things like "mc -b" specifically because CRTs I used sucked at light colors, trinitron displays later were nicer though and using white backgrounds was pleasant. Nowadays led backlit displays suck again on light and bright colors and don't seem to improve, hence "dark mode" became a solution.
And light text on dark background looks better on these too.
With the bright mode I can reduce the brightness of my screens and I can still read everything. I also never have the urge to put dark-mode code on presentation slides that are unreadable in all but perfect condition.
I'd love to see more data though.
More of a click-bait title than necessary. 95% of discord users prefer dark would be more accurate.
I personally like dark mode during night time, but almost always prefer light mode by default. There's just something about dark mode that is... gloomy and depressing. It feels like an overcast day, whereas light mode feels like a bright sunny day. I've noticed that most techies do prefer dark mode, and I also recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls - I wonder if there's a correlation there. I suspect though that this preference is reversed for the general population.
I'm a programmer so spend a ton of time in my IDE. Polar is designed for people that read a LOT so dark mode really matters to them.
When you're reading 100s of PDFs having a dark mode is kind of important!
In retrospect I'm kicking myself not working on this sooner.
... It definitely would be great to get more apps to release their data. I reached out to IntelliJ about IDEA data but I didn't hear anything back.
There's a lot of pushback I've seen when studies like that get cited: they're old, they weren't about programmers, etc. And, maybe, but even though we're staring at LCD panels now rather than CRTs, light is light light and vision is vision. It's not about how much light is "shining into your eyes" as much as it is about visual acuity, and it's at least worth trying light mode and just... turning down the brightness on your monitor a little. Also, turning up the ambient light in the room. If your environment is so dark that the backlighting on your keyboard is visible, then you've tacitly designed your environment to make light mode blinding and uncomfortable, so you're not really giving it a fair shake.
I'd like to see studies about whether alternating between dark and light mode occasionally will help prevent your eyes from getting tired as quickly; my suspicion is yes, because it certainly does feel that way to me. But a lot of things that seem intuitively true don't stand up to scrutiny.
Dark themes/backgrounds have far worse issues with screen glare from badly configured room lighting than light ones do in my experience.
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I'm also curious why another area of design that is extremely concerned with legibility seems to have reached the opposite conclusion, pretty much worldwide.
Road signs.
Even though signs themselves can vary widely, the standard color scheme for road signs in every developed country I can think of, is a darker background with lighter text. I certainly don't have the studies in front of me, but I know a great deal of research has gone into fonts and legibility for road signs, and I presume what we see on the roads in the world is the result.
The road signs are an interesting question. I know there's a lot of work, and occasional controversy, over the typefaces used. If I had to hazard a guess for the color choices, though, it might be the signs have to be very visible in the dark, too -- that's now generally done by using reflective paint for the light part of the sign, but older highway signs, at least in America, used reflective dots in the letters. So that might be a tradition born less out of legibility studies than practicality.
I used dark mode in IDEA for YEARS and I can't believe I didn't push harder to have a dark mode in Polar earlier.
This is why it's good to listen to your users!
I’m talking 27 inch, 4K resolution, color (even just 4096 colors might be enough for a lot of software development work) monitors running at 60Hz or higher, with eInk technology and backlight that can be dialed all the way from full brightness to no backlight at all, which should be sold at a price somewhere between the same and 2x to 3x or 4x the price of what LED displays of similar size and specs currently cost today.
I hope we may see that on the market one day.
E-ink screens can make dark mode irrelevant. But the market for them hasn't been built, and the tech isn't effective at fast refresh. Yet.
I stare at a screen for more than 12 hours most days, but I strongly prefer light mode over dark, so I'm not sure the amount of screen time is what makes the difference.
As one of the former, I find I am also very sensitive to light at night. Seeing a bright light within an hour or two of bedtime will push the point when I fall asleep back significantly.
If I may be mildly unflattering for a moment, I think it's just a trendiness thing. Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something.
If someone has real data showing it actually causes less eyestrain or something, I'm willing to change that opinion.
- It makes my eye floaters much harder to notice
- Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones
It was (and still is, but read on) for me until I realised that it was not light mode but backlight that was too strong. It was actually initially better with dark modes, low contrast stuff like zenburn, or (solarize light or dark) but only got worse later.
The moment I realised that was a backlight (and ambient light, including temperature) issue I moved back to light mode.
The above mentioned solutions have the nasty side effect that people usually increase backlight, which just makes things even worse!
I also use f.lux/nightmode on all devices.
My phone is currently set to 10%
I hate that there's no way to acess more fine-grained levels below the arbitrarily imposed minimum. I realize most people would think their phone is broken if they could get it into a state where it doesn't produce any perceivable output despite not being explicitly off. I just wish there were some secret handshake I could use to confirm that I'm okay with having to find the brightness control while not being able to see anything; I already do that when I'm outside in the bright sun.
I have been wondering for a long time what determines the backlight minimum, why can't we go darker? Surely phones can be expected to be used in pitch black?
https://f-droid.org/app/giraffine.dimmer
1. It can block "Install" button when installing apks from outside of Play Store. Disable it
2. Latest commit is 4 years ago. But I've still chosen it over Red Moon because it's more than 10x smaller (336kB but still very configurable).
in truth, I don't think I'd be able to do my job at all without dark-mode text editors / terminals
For me it's nice when I can use a pure black background on an OLED screen and just have that much less light being produced beyond just turning down the brightness on a screen.
Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.
It's cool to be comfortable, and now easier. OLED screens invert the default behavior of a screen from light to dark. It'd be absurd to fight the comfort that this can provide.
So, I agree, it's cool to be comfortable.
go into dark room. read black text on white background. observe how you are squinting and its hard to read. enable dark mode. (you can use something like night mode for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-light-m... if you arent sure how). profit.
Most work areas are not lit well enough. For my own home office I have about 19,000 lumens of light in a relatively modest space. Same brightness as a cloudy day outside. In that environment, a white background is very pleasing to the eye, especially with crisp displays.
One advantage of dark backgrounds is that it's easier to distinguish many colors against something dark, so for code that uses heavy syntax highlighting, it looks nicer. But the edges of characters render better against white backgrounds, so it's a tradeoff...
One area where dark mode shines is if the environment doesn't allow for ambient light, such as checking the phone or laptop when someone is sleeping in the room.
If you have a computer, you probably have electric lighting. Just use that.
I also work through the dark hours the night. Switching between bright white terminal/app/ide to pitch black, as I do every night, is jarring and, again, gives me headaches. Dark mode should be an option just like every site should be accessible to any assistive technology.
Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (DOS and UNIX). This applies to screens in well lit environments though, which would explain the rise of the dark mode in recent years: Smartphones in bed. But there it's more about the "less bad" solution.
The key part is having a well lit environment, so that the white background of the screen roughly matches the overall brightness of the surroundings. This way the pupils don't have to adjust all the time when looking around your room and then back at your screen, or when looking at code where the screen is mostly black with some text, and then some article with images.
Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length units, but were usually based on some fixed notional dpi rather than matching the size on the physical screen).
There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.
Can you substantiate this?
If you are talking about research based on modern oled devices then I'd love to read it. Maybe I'm weird.
In fact the single greatest thing that computer manufacturers could do to improve the lives of night-time workers and people who use their computers with the lights off would be to switch to OLED screens, where the black pixels do not use backlight. As someone who studies human vision, I took special note of the improvement when I switched to a phone that uses an OLED screen in dark mode. There, with white on black text, the white text is the only thing in the room giving off light and it’s a drastic improvement.
However if the colors do not matter (you can deal with monochrome text and images), then using a true “red mode” will produce the least eye strain. Check out F.Lux’s “darkroom” color effect. You’ll feel the difference instantly. You’ll be able to comfortably see what’s on the screen in the dark with the screen as the only light source, as well as be able to quickly scan around the room without your eyes needing to adjust! You can even turn up the brightness much higher than you can without it.
I suspect this is a big part of it. The interesting thing is, terminal emulators flipped to light backgrounds when it became practical (for instance, see the Solaris X11 one, or, later, Apple's one). The reversion to white on dark was a later thing.
I'm inclined to blame Microsoft; their Windows terminal emulator never went dark on light (though, interestingly, their bundled telnet and modem clients did). I think they were afraid of breaking DOS software that made assumptions about the black background.
There are studies linking the high blue light content of LEDs to health issues regarding eyesight and sleep. AFAIK the eyesight thing has only be tested with mice, but conduct your own research.
I use dark wallpapers for years now, and just yesterday when I wanted to try a brighter one for a change I instantly changed it back because the bright shine was so annoying.
A "night owl" is someone who enjoys being awake and active at night more than the average person, but most people who describe themselves as "night owls" still spend most of their waking hours during the day, especially when they are working, especially if they work in software development at a normal 9-5 job.
https://i.redd.it/qre9cvey3r0z.png
[1] https://userstyles.org/styles/22794/a-dark-hacker-news
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
These both are likely also available for Chrome.
Do I have diplopia or do people with diplopia see more of the effect?
I have my monitors set fairly dim, about 120cd/m^2. This is what most colorspaces expect the whitepoint to be, but it is very dim compared to the maximum amount of light a monitor can put out. It is about 12/100 on my monitor.
https://hub.displaycal.net/forums/topic/what-monitor-brightn...
Anyway, my point here is that #ffffff is not any sort of color you can see, merely a number that represents the maximum possible amount of red, green, and blue. If that's too much light, you can turn it down. You can also play with gamma curves to change the relative intensities down to pure black. Some people use 2.2 in dark rooms and 2.4 for "normal" indoor illumination.
example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisKempson/Tomorrow-Them...
JetBrains compatible version: https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme/tree/master/J...
Does anyone else have this?
Is it brain cancer?!
edit: Thanks, I'm pretty sure it's not cancer.
Question: But why me? Age? Staring too long at monitors? Drugs? It doesn't seem to effect too many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage
Similarly, this is why your eyes can hurt while reading in dimmer settings. It's not because low light itself is somehow harmful while reading, but because your eyes have a harder time staying focused as you naturally move while reading.
edit: I adopted light themes everywhere after reading this, probably https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/53268 . Knowing depth of field from photography helped this make sense, as well as understanding (from conversations with a doctor in my family) that the generic feeling "strain" is most likely associated with muscle activity than anything else.
It was easy for me many years ago. I looked at command lines all day and no problem.
Now I see blurry lines for 10 minutes all around me if I have to spend any length of time in a command line interface, or look at an article in dark mode.
This is, unfortunately, an accessibility issue, not a design issue.
It's perfectly reasonable to use dark-on-light in a terminal emulator; Apple's one defaults to it, for instance.
That being said, I have pretty good luck with browser plugins that auto dark mode websites reasonably well. I'm not sure I'd go redesigning the entire web with darkmodes in mind when plugins can do a good enough job.
For some people, yes. For others, no. That's why this should be a configurable option.
[citation needed]. Why do people keep making these general statements. Every time they do counter-examples immediately appear in replies. Why can't we all agree that we're all different and it's largely a matter of preference.
Native widgets play significantly better with all accessibility tools, in part because native widgets are so customizable. You didn't need bespoke "Dark Mode" that was some designer's wet dream of what an interface should look like, you could just customize your widgets for what you needed: https://66.media.tumblr.com/19cb7fe3e0eef36debbd0167d6e6e0ea...
I'd say users expect things to look like what they are used to, whatever that user-specific preference is.
Anecdotes not data etc.
My own belief is that when a sea of white is removed the need for 'crisp black' to stand out against it is also reduced; this might relate to a different perceived contrast due to the lowered noise floor (far less photons being rejected, so it's easier to pick out the desired ones).
Which of course contrasts with the “dark mode” for OLED devices, which do use black.
“Good” implementations I’ve seen allow a couple of choices.
As with almost all aesthetic preferences, your mileage and your hardware may vary.
IMHO "Hot Dog Stand" on Windows 3.1 was the best it could ever be. Dear god don't let Hot Dog Stand be the default.