Customize your device for your comfort. Even if there are studies that show on average humans retain information better reading in light mode. That's merely the average! Variation is the only certainty in biology. It's good we have options.
First I found I read my kindle more than physical books even though I prefer the look and feel of physical books. Then I found I read even more on my ipad with the kindle app showing white text on a black background.
Find what works for you. Or if you are a UX designer, provide options.
I think the better advice is, customize your environment for your comfort.
Often the reason why people use dark mode is that they use their devices in badly lit environments. It's not a good idea to stare into a bright monitor in a dark room, and the dark mode is arguably the wrong fix for the problem. Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided.
If someone really needs to work in a dark environment tools like flux/redshift are a better solution.
While true, it'd be nice if they could meet in the middle. Laptops and phones autodim but I can't say I've seen this on desktop monitors. I see dark mode (not enough of it though), auto dark mode much more rarely. Lights that autodim are a thing but not common and usually part of the internet of shit.
I don't really want to customize things multiple times daily. And if I have to pick, it will be dark, because it's easier on the eyes when the sun goes down and I dim the lights in anticipation of going to bed.
> Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided.
If you’re reading something purely reflective like paper, sure. If you’re reading a screen that is shooting rays of light directly into your eyeballs though?
Dimly lit room + brightly lit cube means that whenever your vision tracks outside of the cube it will have to adjust the opening of the iris. Doing this a lot will tire your eyes out. My interpretation of this is that we should try to have about the same light level across our work spaces and that this should be a mean between long term comfort and readability. I think most of us could probably benefit from larger font sizes as well which feel easier to read in lower light to me.
My environment isn't "badly lit". I just don't want bright, flickering light blasted into my eyes at my expense.
I even block natural light using sunglasses when I go outside!
Once upon a time I stared at the Sun for a solid 20 seconds without blinking. I couldn't read text for a month, the letters disappeared from under my center vision. Why in God's name would I want to routinely stare at a bright screen?
They taught us this in advertising. White text scatters over the iris on a dark background, so it’s harder to read the copy. I’ve even read it in UX articles. It was amusing to get out of school and into the tech industry to find dark mode everywhere.
Granted, I use it too. Both my terminal and editor have dark themes. I’m not really sure why. The terminal isn’t really a big deal to me. I could go either way there. But I’ve just never found a lighter color theme that wasn’t offensive in an editor. I always try them for a bit and end up switching back.
This makes intuitive sense to me. I assume it’s to do with more overall light being emitted from a white background/black text combo being easier for our eye to process.
I’ll admit it’s not the best phrasing (and I’m definitely not an ophthalmologist, so I’m playing fast and loose here). Your pupils dilate to let in more light because there’s less light overall when the background is black. This causes your lens to distort slightly, thus making the edges of the white text appear to be fuzzy or bleed into surrounding characters. I couldn’t find a scientific source on this, but a couple articles called it the “Halation effect”. Over time, this creates eye strain, and it’s apparently worse for users who have astigmatism. Of course, if the text is sufficiently large enough, this effect should be at least somewhat mitigated. Generally, at least in my use cases, it’s not large enough. Although the more I think about it, I’m rarely really staring at white on black. It’s usually more like various colors against a very dark navy. I should probably just rest my eyes more...
>[...] This causes your lens to distort slightly, thus making the edges of the white text appear to be fuzzy or bleed into surrounding characters
The effect you're describing is correct, but the mechanism isn't. Aperture (pupil) size directly affects how focused the image is. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the image is. As an extreme example, if your aperture is a single point (a pinhole camera), the image can be focused without a lens.
> Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Yeah, I noticed that. Searching the term directly gave me results related to film, but when I used other terms describing the effect they mentioned it in a different context. Makes me wonder if someone is just confused.
> Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Halation in film is caused by reflection from the back of the film. Most of them have an anti-halation layer to reduce this effect. I don't see any reason why one's eye wouldn't also be vulnerable to this effect (and probably has some biological mechanism to prevent light from being reflected out of the eye. Cats sure don't have this, though.)
To understand the difference between a small pupil and a large one, it's useful to understand how "aperture" settings work on a camera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture
Specifically, bright light results in a small pupil which allows for better focus. And low light results in a large pupil which reduces focus.
I can’t argue with that. I think the syntax highlighting is also part of it. It’s hard to have vivid, readily meaningful colors against a background that is washing everything out. Shades of dark text just aren’t as compelling. Come to think of it, that’s probably why most light themes are “solarized”. I guess you can only go so bright.
I've tried different options, and know what works for me and what doesn't. Not saying it's the same for everybody, but I'm pretty confident that (1) dark mode works wonders for me, and (2) I'm not the only one.
For a light color theme with a slightly different take than usual, I would recommend Flatwhite.
The differentiating idea behind it is that for dark syntax themes, it makes sense to have the foreground of text be different colors. In contrast, for light syntax themes, it makes sense to have the background of text be different colors.
I ran into this trying to do a Code theme a few months ago. (My favorite light theme -- and I am mostly a light theme person, as I have never believed dark mode was a particularly good idea except for terminal windows -- is the default theme from the all-but-defunct Mac editor Espresso, which used subtle background coloring in some places.)
Thought it looked familiar, and I realized I saw the idea in an old Nikita Propokov screencast. Nice to see him mentioned there and Clojure code as an example.
I recall the argument for a dark theme in editors/IDEs was to make it visually easier to see color differences in code syntax. With a white background, the white light competes with the colors. Where as if you're reading an article on the web, you'll really just need to discern the text and not so much the color.
> Granted, I use it too. Both my terminal and editor have dark themes. I’m not really sure why. The terminal isn’t really a big deal to me. I could go either way there. But I’ve just never found a lighter color theme that wasn’t offensive in an editor. I always try them for a bit and end up switching back.
I spent ages hunting for a VSCode theme that wasn't just a blob of undifferentiated white. Turns out, now light themes are designed as dark themes first, flipped and just generally obey the rules of dark themes (eg. color pops out a ton in dark mode, it's a much more balanced part of the UI in a positive polarity environment and can be used more liberally).
We used to just design UIs, and most of what people started calling light themes were actually just "normal, not trying to be obsessively dark UI design". Normal UI design has really wide latitude to use a lot of stuff, dark theme is a much more narrow, specific philosophy in comparison. Take a look at eg. Office apps. The default "light" theme isn't super white, it's called "Colorful", is colorful, and it looks great. It just does what looks good without trying to be especially light or dark and surprise surprise, it works.
What did I end up with? Visual Studio Blue. All the different UI things are various very distinct shades of blue so the app has a characterful look and the UI elements are clearly differentiated, and the background has a slightly yellow hue to it. Does it look a little early 2000s-y? Yes. But it works.
I think that they should mostly avoid CSS when needed, and then it should use the default colours configured by the user. But when they need to specify colours in their document, then they should specify all of them (specifying only some colours and not others causes problems) and use the "prefers-color-scheme" command to implement it. It is then the user's job if they like dark mode or not. If you do not like dark mode, then do not enable it in your web browser.
No one seems to be mentioning the lighting of the room you're in, inside/outside, or the time of day. Ambient light is one of the primary factors that make light or dark mode better at a particular moment. See redshift to make light mode more tolerable at night.
...buried 2 or 3 menu layers deep, using a magic sequence of three buttons to handle all the up-down/left-right multi-level hierarchical menu navigation complexities.
One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)
TV's should do this too. With smart TV's/rokus/firesticks/whatever, what's the use of having a channel toggle? Repurpose that for one-button brightness shifts. I don't need my TV being a spotlight into my face when I turn it on to watch a movie at night with the lights dimmed.
Dark mode and red shift are helpful, but really this thread nails it... it's relative contrast that is the big eyestrain contributor. It should be as easy to change brightness as it is volume.
> "One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons"
Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.
I have an external keyboard that's a common split-ergo design, probably one of the top 3 workhorses on amazon for "ergo keyboard" (Apple hardware is pretty, but it's not ergonomic).
By dumb luck I just found that it's ScrLk and Pause/Break that do brightness controls on my external monitor on os-x.
I wish apple made it as easy to remap these kinds of global shortcut keys as IDE's do.
It's insane how monitor software hasn't developed an inch from the 90s. How hard can it be to have an open API for the basic controls at least so the OS can adjust them? Everything about my monitor is great - 144hz refresh rate, great viewing angle and colors - except if I want to change any of the physical properties (brightness, contrast) I'm clicking around on a variety of buttons that I can't see like I'm trying to set the clock on my VCR.
Thanks for the hot tip! I've been struggling with my monitor's menu buttons, but after reading your comment I found the macOS tool MonitorControl, which works perfectly.
I can control laptop brightness with `/sys/class/backlight/foo`, and my asus external monitor advertises capabilities over hdmi with `modprobe i2c-dev` and then `ddcutil capabilities`. Apparently this is governed by something called MCCS. You can find more info on the arch wiki.
https://clickmonitorddc.bplaced.net/
I rarely use the interface anymore, this software has replaced it. Unfortunately I'm unaware of anything that works well for any other operating system.
There's a rust library I've used in the past for DDC I think, but that means coding your own implementations, and I was only making a source switcher
> seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate
I'm sorry, what?
I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth.
I can't stand keyboards without function keys, or where you have to press Fn to activate them.
That's because you're used to them, that's fine. Many of those actions can be done via key combos or other keys (esp on a Mac), like C+R to refresh, C+Sh+I for browser console or Enter to rename a file. Function keys at this point are certainly old school and could even be considered an atavism, like the Print Screen button or the numeric keypad.
Some functions have replacements, others don't. Just one example: both F5 and CTRL-R in browsers do a refresh; CTRL-F5 does a hard refresh (also renews the cache); I don't think there's a non-function-key alternative for that. Losing the function keys would be a major nuisance.
The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.
I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.
In the meaning of outdated artifacts, like those turbo buttons on old PC boxes or three button mice. Fn + arrow keys or fn+bksp for del easily replace the specific navigation keys and are for me easier to find by touch with less movement of the wrist.
I had the impression you meant something like that, but I wasn't sure (I'm not a native English speaker) so I looked it up and the dictionary gave me a different meaning, so that got me confused.
Tons of software uses the function keys, especially Windows/cross-platform software. Lots of engineering tools, editing tools, content authoring, programming, etc.
Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, including Windows itself (which lots of people run using Bootcamp or Parallels). Maybe they're weird, I don't know. Momentum is a powerful force, especially when it comes to software design.
Also for the record, Print Screen takes a screenshot on Windows (and on a lot of Linux systems), which is intuitive and simple. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's an abandoned key.
I agree that brightness should be easier to reach. On my Dell monitor, it can be configured to be behind one button press, then changed with up / down. On my LG monitor, it's atrocious. Have to go 2-3 layers deep with an awful joystick.
This is one of the reasons I absolutely love my Apple display. It changes brightness automatically and most of the time it does it right.
Also, DDC/CI is a thing and (sometimes) works.
On Windows, I've found Twinkle Tray on the store works reasonably well.
For Linux there's ddcci-dkms on Ubuntu and ddcci-driver-linux-dkms for Arch Linux (on the AUR). They allow configuring the brightness as a regular backlight device. See the Arch Linux Wiki [0].
If your monitor supports DDC [1] you can control the brightness with MonitorControl [2]. It's fantastic. However it's basically impossible to figure out before buying if monitors do or don't support DDC. In general Dell Ultrasharps do, and I was surprised when the old Acer I'm on now did as well.
One more nice thing that some computers do is automatically adjusting brightness depending on your ambient light. Like phones which have dedicated light sensor. But at least my computer uses webcam (or sensor near a webcam) to determine ambient brightness and adjust monitor brightness. EDIT. ah, yes, and i don't use external monitor. But makes me think, why monitor manufacturers have not added that one light sensor to their products.
And sync multiple monitors to have the same brightness twice a day?
Even with brightness adjustments, working in complete dark at night the dark mode is much easier to use. The keyboard lights on the lowest level is a bit too bright in these conditions, white screens are a punch in the face for me.
Yeah, I'm not sure you can say anything meaningful about eye strain and readability without accounting for room lighting, glare, and other reflective surfaces and distractions. If I'm in a dark room with a bright screen, it's almost physically painful to stare at the screen. I have to turn the brightness way down, and then I lose contrast and have to strain even more. In an office with horrible flourescent lighting, highly-reflective white walls and surfaces, metallic accents reflecting light into my peripheral vision, reflective monitors (Apple displays are the worst), and eyeglasses, I'm practically blinded. The last thing I want is glaring white light from my application windows.
There are things other than black-on-white and the inverse. I've been using Solarized dark where possible for years, especially in code windows. White-on-black is horrible, but pastel colors on a slate blue-gray background is the most comfortable option for me.
If you're using a monitor with separate brightness and contrast settings, you might also choose to lower the contrast a bit. When my monitor's contrast is at 75%, white doesn't really get less bright until somewhere around 30% brightness. But I'd I lower contrast to 50%, then 50% brightness makes a bigger difference, without losing readability.
I use light mode when I am working outside (which is a lot now that I work from home) or when I am at the office as it's got bright lights. At night or when I am in a darker environment in general, dark mode is great. Being able to quickly adjust the screen brightness also helps immensely (more so than the actual mode, actually... if I had to choose a single mode, it would be light mode, as dark mode is totally un-usable in a very light room/outside).
I’ve been using Flux for a decade and it was my saviour from headaches and eye strain. Before that I was experimenting with dark themes and after running into f.lux I never really needed to. Im usually ok with whatever default theme is. I’been using f-lux at the lowest temperature and my eye strain never came back.
Exactly this. If I have pager duty and wake up in the night and need to read an e-mail (LCD screen), light mode blinds me so much I cannot even keep my eyes open. With dark mode I can read fine.
This is what I like about iOS (and probably every OS has it): after sundown, turn on dark mode.
Exactly! When I started using dark mode, it felt so much more pleasant for my eyes. After a while I realized this was because I was in generally dark environments a lot, so I started to switch up my environment instead: I.e. light up the room with a large ceiling lamp instead of just a small reading lamp on a desk etc.
I noticed when I'm working in the morning or generally when it's bright outside, it's sooo much more relaxing with black on white text. With night mode, I'd need to up the brightness way more to be able to comfortably read and type. It was sort of a revelation to me because the "night mode is better" mindset was so engrained into my mind at that point.
iOS was late to the dark theme train, but they did it right. One setting can change between light and dark depending on time of day, sunset times, etc.
I like dark mode on my phone, because when I want to read at night (i.e. in bed) even on the lowest settings the screen feels too bright on light mode. On my computer though I don't really care, I never use it in a completely dark rom, so at night I just dim the display and have the colour temperature shift.
Some phones allow you to go darker than the lowest setting using an accessibility filter. On iOS, you can do this with the Zoom feature (set to 0% zoom and with a dark filter layered on top). I don't know why they don't just offer the filter without having to go through the unintuitive Zoom setting, and I only happened to learn of this feature because I talked to an Apple employee who works on accessibility.
I now use this as my triple-click functionality since it is more universal than inverting colors (which can cause issues on some websites, with photos, etc.).
Personally I like dark mode for macOS/iOS windows, menus etc... but light mode inside apps / on websites for reading text such as blogs, ebooks and emails.
For example Youtube and Twitch where the main content is in video format, dark mode is excellent - just like how the lights turn off in theatres.
Now when it comes to typing, in a Markdown app for example, a white background and black font feels more natural - just like a good old piece of paper.
"Unless you’re using an OLED or AMOLED screen and your dark mode is truly black – not dark grey, not dark blue, BLACK. There is no difference in power consumption."
I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness.
At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
LCD screens are really cool! My dad had a half-broken one at some point, and we peeled the outer layer partly off. It was pure white underneath. Just constant white light, no matter what was being displayed.
But if you looked at the pure white with polarized sunglasses, you could see the image! The pixels don't turn on and off, they just change polarization. And there's a thin layer that blocks light of one polarization, but not the other.
Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.
> At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
It is absolutely settled, and has been tested over and over again. Power is roughly proportional to the amount of light emitted[1], so having dark grey is absolutely a power savings over pure white.
[1]: This isn't totally true mostly because the display is broken into RGB elements emitting light of differing efficiencies and human perception of the brightness of those elements is not identical.
> I’ve decided to stop using dark mode across all of my devices, because research suggests that going to the dark side ain’t all that.
It makes sense to use research to make a decision that is based on data that applies equally across a population. But for something that is a personal preference, it doesn't make as much sense to rely on population-level data. If you started using dark mode because you liked it, then you shouldn't stop using it because, on average, the general population performs marginally better with light mode.
I use dark mode IDEs exclusively because light mode ones remind me of my early experiences with Eclipse, Ant builds, and horrible enterprise Java. Which just isn’t something I want to think about when I’m working on projects that I enjoy.
I thought this article was going to point out that something had been discovered that challenged our belief about the way light influences our own circadian rhythm—nope! Dark mode for me is imperative, since I use my devices at night, and want my body to stay aligned to it's internal biological clock as closely as possible. Pretty significant omission.
A lot of visual professional apps tend to be color neutral so you don't bias your work. Whether for trendiness or for functional reasons they also all tend to use darker colors for their UI. This seems to extend to audio apps, too. For color-accurate work ambient light is lowered (windows are covered and walls tend to be painted neutral). Even Photoshop transitioned to a darker-and-darker UI between CS4-CS6 (~2015).
It's really jarring when spending hours inside these apps and jump to a file browser or web browser and get blasted with light.
For me, dark mode is what you used on old 50 Hz CRT:s, where a light background would flicker so horribly that it drove you crazy in five minutes. If you had the luxury of professional kit, you used black-on-white.
Personally, I enjoy changing colourschemes based on where I'm working.
Outside on the balcony? Xterm/vim with white background.
11pm in the livingroom? Xterm/vim with dark background.
I usually have a browser open when I'm coding, so being able to invert the colours is useful for me. If dark mode isn't dark enough, I wrote a Qt script to overlay 50% black overtop of all screens. Does anyone do this to preserve battery life?
At least the dark grey type on a light grey background seems to have gone away. Mostly. Maybe because if you go too far in that direction, Google's crawler decides you're keyword-stuffing with invisible text.
Part of the reason I like dark mode is because it looks "computery".
I grew with Hercules Monochrome monitors (green on black), and that's always been a comfortable color scheme for me.
In my Turbo Pascal days, I began to have an affinity for white text over blue backgrounds.
I believe it was during the days of Windows 3.0 (1990) was when white backgrounds became the norm, and we've been stuck with that for over 3 decades. Not even the early X Windows programs had white backgrounds -- Mosaic and Netscape had grey backgrounds and muted chrome.
I think dark backgrounds evoke nostalgia (at least among some of us).
I recall Word having a “white text on blue” option for quite a while as comfort to the millions moving over from WordPerfect. Blue backgrounds and Borland themes definitely evoke nostalgia.
I'll never understand what happened about that time period. We went from the idea of "try minimize eye strain" to "fsck it! White looks great! Let's stare at light bulbs all day!". Grey backgrounds are a lot softer on the eyes.
I'm still running black text on light grey as my primary colour scheme for text editing since AmigaDOS 2.0 in the 90s. Seriously.
Personally I appreciate the ability to switch color modes.
I've found that when reading articles or text I like dark text on a white background. So news apps are kept in light mode.
For development i like that darker themes allows me to see the syntax highlighting better. Plus my partner loves the "rainbow text" and knows when I'm working "matrix time" :)
I really wish auto dark mode (based on sunset time I believe) worked better on OSX. On my iPhone it works great and automatically switches to dark mode once the sun sets. On my MacBook it hardly ever remembers to switch across and I'm left with it constantly on light.
Yeah, I’m not sure why it’s so inconsistent. Mine will never switch if there is a power assertion, which Safari seems to always create for no reason. I’m seriously considering going back to my old solution, which hooked directly into Night Shift to synchronize the appearance with that…
I think it’s dependent on the app. Lots of third party apps don’t seem to correctly implement listening for the theme change. In Chrome, for example, I always have the Dev Tools open in a separate window, and the theme seems to change while my Mac is awake, but if the theme is supposed to change while my Mac is asleep, it won’t ever change even after waking the machine up.
Do you mean that your system theme (e.g. the UI of system apps like Finder) doesn’t switch between light and dark based on the time of day? I haven’t encountered that problem, I’ve only seen third-party apps not keep their theme in sync with the system theme.
Rather than argue against dark mode because it's bad for your eyes, I'd prefer to focus on how it's hard to do well with user generated content.
Let's say you users draw diagrams with SVG and the background defaults to white. You make a dark mode. You can't easily fix the SVG. You can't just set the background to black. The SVG's dark colors won't be readable. You can't just set the dark colors to light colors as you have no idea what the diagram is trying to show. The best you can do is set all images to have a white background so any image with transparency is shown in the default but then you end up with large white rectangles on an otherwise dark page which is jarring.
I actually mostly like dark mode. My editors have used dark colors since the 80s. My terminal has been set to a dark color for as long as I can remember on any OS. But, maybe because of bad color choices, I can't focus on stackoverflow's dark mode at all. Maybe it's the blue on dark gray they picked. I don't know what it is but I can't read it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadFirst I found I read my kindle more than physical books even though I prefer the look and feel of physical books. Then I found I read even more on my ipad with the kindle app showing white text on a black background.
Find what works for you. Or if you are a UX designer, provide options.
I think the better advice is, customize your environment for your comfort.
Often the reason why people use dark mode is that they use their devices in badly lit environments. It's not a good idea to stare into a bright monitor in a dark room, and the dark mode is arguably the wrong fix for the problem. Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided.
If someone really needs to work in a dark environment tools like flux/redshift are a better solution.
I don't really want to customize things multiple times daily. And if I have to pick, it will be dark, because it's easier on the eyes when the sun goes down and I dim the lights in anticipation of going to bed.
Modern monitors do have this. Not sure for how many years, but the one I'm currently seated by is 3 years old and has auto dimming.
If you’re reading something purely reflective like paper, sure. If you’re reading a screen that is shooting rays of light directly into your eyeballs though?
Dimly lit room + brightly lit cube means that whenever your vision tracks outside of the cube it will have to adjust the opening of the iris. Doing this a lot will tire your eyes out. My interpretation of this is that we should try to have about the same light level across our work spaces and that this should be a mean between long term comfort and readability. I think most of us could probably benefit from larger font sizes as well which feel easier to read in lower light to me.
I even block natural light using sunglasses when I go outside!
Once upon a time I stared at the Sun for a solid 20 seconds without blinking. I couldn't read text for a month, the letters disappeared from under my center vision. Why in God's name would I want to routinely stare at a bright screen?
Granted, I use it too. Both my terminal and editor have dark themes. I’m not really sure why. The terminal isn’t really a big deal to me. I could go either way there. But I’ve just never found a lighter color theme that wasn’t offensive in an editor. I always try them for a bit and end up switching back.
That doesn't make sense. Why does light from white text scatter, but not light from white background?
The effect you're describing is correct, but the mechanism isn't. Aperture (pupil) size directly affects how focused the image is. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the image is. As an extreme example, if your aperture is a single point (a pinhole camera), the image can be focused without a lens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture#Maximum_and_minimum_a...
>I couldn’t find a scientific source on this, but a couple articles called it the “Halation effect”.
Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Yeah, I noticed that. Searching the term directly gave me results related to film, but when I used other terms describing the effect they mentioned it in a different context. Makes me wonder if someone is just confused.
Diffraction limits the sharpness, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system. Pesky wave nature of light in action.
> Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Halation in film is caused by reflection from the back of the film. Most of them have an anti-halation layer to reduce this effect. I don't see any reason why one's eye wouldn't also be vulnerable to this effect (and probably has some biological mechanism to prevent light from being reflected out of the eye. Cats sure don't have this, though.)
Specifically, bright light results in a small pupil which allows for better focus. And low light results in a large pupil which reduces focus.
For me, it’s because too much white background feels like staring directly at a light globe for several hours a day, and it hurts my eyes.
"On a biological level, our eyes prefer the contrast between a light background and dark foreground."
On a biological level, our eyes prefer not to stare at a light source all day every day. Yet here we are.
For monitors, you should be adjusting the brightness frequently and in accordance with the ambient light level.
If you do that, you should perceive the background of your light mode content as neutral and so inoffensive that you don't even notice it.
The differentiating idea behind it is that for dark syntax themes, it makes sense to have the foreground of text be different colors. In contrast, for light syntax themes, it makes sense to have the background of text be different colors.
Atom: https://github.com/biletskyy/flatwhite-syntax Sublime Text 3: https://github.com/Willamin/flatwhite
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3429
I ran into this trying to do a Code theme a few months ago. (My favorite light theme -- and I am mostly a light theme person, as I have never believed dark mode was a particularly good idea except for terminal windows -- is the default theme from the all-but-defunct Mac editor Espresso, which used subtle background coloring in some places.)
I spent ages hunting for a VSCode theme that wasn't just a blob of undifferentiated white. Turns out, now light themes are designed as dark themes first, flipped and just generally obey the rules of dark themes (eg. color pops out a ton in dark mode, it's a much more balanced part of the UI in a positive polarity environment and can be used more liberally).
We used to just design UIs, and most of what people started calling light themes were actually just "normal, not trying to be obsessively dark UI design". Normal UI design has really wide latitude to use a lot of stuff, dark theme is a much more narrow, specific philosophy in comparison. Take a look at eg. Office apps. The default "light" theme isn't super white, it's called "Colorful", is colorful, and it looks great. It just does what looks good without trying to be especially light or dark and surprise surprise, it works.
What did I end up with? Visual Studio Blue. All the different UI things are various very distinct shades of blue so the app has a characterful look and the UI elements are clearly differentiated, and the background has a slightly yellow hue to it. Does it look a little early 2000s-y? Yes. But it works.
Also, there's been conflicting research if blue light is actually harmful
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)
TV's should do this too. With smart TV's/rokus/firesticks/whatever, what's the use of having a channel toggle? Repurpose that for one-button brightness shifts. I don't need my TV being a spotlight into my face when I turn it on to watch a movie at night with the lights dimmed.
Dark mode and red shift are helpful, but really this thread nails it... it's relative contrast that is the big eyestrain contributor. It should be as easy to change brightness as it is volume.
Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.
If the keyboard has media keys, then, generally speaking, F2 and F3 will be linked to brightness by default.
By dumb luck I just found that it's ScrLk and Pause/Break that do brightness controls on my external monitor on os-x.
I wish apple made it as easy to remap these kinds of global shortcut keys as IDE's do.
That’s not even a joke.
I only recently learned about it myself while setting up a new monitor and asking myself wtf is this DDC/CI setting in the menu.
Mainframe programmers.
They are an essential part of interacting with an IBM mainframe (even for basic things like paging up and down through documents).
I'm sorry, what?
I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth.
I can't stand keyboards without function keys, or where you have to press Fn to activate them.
The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.
I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.
Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, including Windows itself (which lots of people run using Bootcamp or Parallels). Maybe they're weird, I don't know. Momentum is a powerful force, especially when it comes to software design.
Also for the record, Print Screen takes a screenshot on Windows (and on a lot of Linux systems), which is intuitive and simple. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's an abandoned key.
This is one of the reasons I absolutely love my Apple display. It changes brightness automatically and most of the time it does it right.
Also, DDC/CI is a thing and (sometimes) works.
On Windows, I've found Twinkle Tray on the store works reasonably well.
For Linux there's ddcci-dkms on Ubuntu and ddcci-driver-linux-dkms for Arch Linux (on the AUR). They allow configuring the brightness as a regular backlight device. See the Arch Linux Wiki [0].
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight#External_moni...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel [2] https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
Even with brightness adjustments, working in complete dark at night the dark mode is much easier to use. The keyboard lights on the lowest level is a bit too bright in these conditions, white screens are a punch in the face for me.
There are things other than black-on-white and the inverse. I've been using Solarized dark where possible for years, especially in code windows. White-on-black is horrible, but pastel colors on a slate blue-gray background is the most comfortable option for me.
This is what I like about iOS (and probably every OS has it): after sundown, turn on dark mode.
I noticed when I'm working in the morning or generally when it's bright outside, it's sooo much more relaxing with black on white text. With night mode, I'd need to up the brightness way more to be able to comfortably read and type. It was sort of a revelation to me because the "night mode is better" mindset was so engrained into my mind at that point.
I now use this as my triple-click functionality since it is more universal than inverting colors (which can cause issues on some websites, with photos, etc.).
For example Youtube and Twitch where the main content is in video format, dark mode is excellent - just like how the lights turn off in theatres.
Now when it comes to typing, in a Markdown app for example, a white background and black font feels more natural - just like a good old piece of paper.
I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness.
At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
According to this article there is a difference (between grey and black), but it is very small?
But if you looked at the pure white with polarized sunglasses, you could see the image! The pixels don't turn on and off, they just change polarization. And there's a thin layer that blocks light of one polarization, but not the other.
EDIT: Wikipedia has a picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#/media/...
CRT - Black didn't light up the pixels (I don't remember the details as to how), so it did reduce power usage some.
LCD - Had a constant backlight (see sibling comment for details), so there was little to no difference between black and anything else.
OLED/AMOLED - Black LEDs are actually turned off, instead of displaying a dark color, so we're back to it saving power - more even than CRTs did.
Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.
It is absolutely settled, and has been tested over and over again. Power is roughly proportional to the amount of light emitted[1], so having dark grey is absolutely a power savings over pure white.
Google slides: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18076502/google-dark-mode... Display energy modeling: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/stvr.1635
[1]: This isn't totally true mostly because the display is broken into RGB elements emitting light of differing efficiencies and human perception of the brightness of those elements is not identical.
It makes sense to use research to make a decision that is based on data that applies equally across a population. But for something that is a personal preference, it doesn't make as much sense to rely on population-level data. If you started using dark mode because you liked it, then you shouldn't stop using it because, on average, the general population performs marginally better with light mode.
I prefer sepia background for reader mode and ebooks. Night themes always for text editors.
It also matters a lot on when the room is brightly lit or not.
It's really jarring when spending hours inside these apps and jump to a file browser or web browser and get blasted with light.
It does not come up that way for me. I'm on OSX with appearance set to dark. (Firefox 77.0.1)
Is there something I'm doing wrong? YC is a light theme too.
Outside on the balcony? Xterm/vim with white background. 11pm in the livingroom? Xterm/vim with dark background.
I usually have a browser open when I'm coding, so being able to invert the colours is useful for me. If dark mode isn't dark enough, I wrote a Qt script to overlay 50% black overtop of all screens. Does anyone do this to preserve battery life?
I grew with Hercules Monochrome monitors (green on black), and that's always been a comfortable color scheme for me.
In my Turbo Pascal days, I began to have an affinity for white text over blue backgrounds.
I believe it was during the days of Windows 3.0 (1990) was when white backgrounds became the norm, and we've been stuck with that for over 3 decades. Not even the early X Windows programs had white backgrounds -- Mosaic and Netscape had grey backgrounds and muted chrome.
I think dark backgrounds evoke nostalgia (at least among some of us).
I'm still running black text on light grey as my primary colour scheme for text editing since AmigaDOS 2.0 in the 90s. Seriously.
I've found that when reading articles or text I like dark text on a white background. So news apps are kept in light mode.
For development i like that darker themes allows me to see the syntax highlighting better. Plus my partner loves the "rainbow text" and knows when I'm working "matrix time" :)
I love this. My wife calls it "the black screens"
Same, but a problem nowadays is that if you have your OS in dark mode, some site designers detect this and serve you up dark CSS :-(
Really frustrating.
If I set my city manually then it works.
https://justgetflux.com/
Let's say you users draw diagrams with SVG and the background defaults to white. You make a dark mode. You can't easily fix the SVG. You can't just set the background to black. The SVG's dark colors won't be readable. You can't just set the dark colors to light colors as you have no idea what the diagram is trying to show. The best you can do is set all images to have a white background so any image with transparency is shown in the default but then you end up with large white rectangles on an otherwise dark page which is jarring.
I actually mostly like dark mode. My editors have used dark colors since the 80s. My terminal has been set to a dark color for as long as I can remember on any OS. But, maybe because of bad color choices, I can't focus on stackoverflow's dark mode at all. Maybe it's the blue on dark gray they picked. I don't know what it is but I can't read it.