Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily.
Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too.
But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.
I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite.
If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport
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I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.”
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.
Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
Monitors used to have easy rotary buttons to adjust brightness and contrast. Though I don’t remember it actually being necessary that often. Of course, the monitors rarely changed location.
In assuming you are not using your keyboard to set brightness because it’s an external display plugged into a laptop? Search for a DDC application for your desktop, it’s amazing, the brightness controls of your laptop will then control the external display as well. I use lunar on my MacBook, it was a revelation.
According to my (limited) testing, you can only control brightness when the transfer function used on the HDR content you see is HLG. When it is PQ, the luminance seems to be “absolute” and ignores the display’s brightness settings.
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.
The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.
For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).
There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.
Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).
I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once (bold cursive if it is a parameter, god forbid): instant attention to what is usually a code-smell.
Code can be read without any syntax highlighting or text decoration, obviously. But adding those things is an additional information stream that makes processing faster and more reliable (redundancy in general has this effect).
As you said, it is especially useful for making certain code smells instantly visible at a glance.
I also find that different kinds of code will get different "color rhythms" (e.g. low-level algorithmic code vs. high-level code that calls a lot of functions vs. code that does a lot of operations / mutation of object or class properties) when syntax highlighting is properly semantic. This makes scanning for certain types of things (where objects are being mutated, where variables are introduced, etc) extremely fast, since you don't even need to read the characters.
I also find that rich syntax highlighting makes the codebase easier to remember, since the color (along with things like the line-lengths) gives each function a sort of unique visual texture.
Of course, all of this is personal preference. I am a very visual thinker so this kind of stuff helps a lot for me. Some people are far more verbal in their mental imagery or may remember code chunks solely based on semantics. Then, obviously, a bunch of color and/or text decorations might not matter much, or even just be a distraction.
In my usage, the coloring allows my eyes to “snap” to relevant chunks of code and restrict scanning to the bounds of those chunks.
Functionally it seems similar to spatial memory where landmarks are used as navigation shorthand and is impaired in circumstances where everything looks the same (e.g. in one of those sprawling suburbs with 100 of the same house).
I remember colors better than I remember names. It's a difference in how I process text, and for code where there's already 'types' of syntax, colors help differentiate between all those. It's not that I can't find the for loop, it's just that visually it becomes more distinct to me if all loops are a certain color. And class names are a certain color. And those colors tend to stand out better on a dark background than a light one. Reading light themes, or even unthemed code just feels like an additional chore that's solved pretty simply by using a dark theme.
No one needs it, but it's nice to have. It's the difference between being partially or fully colorblind or not being so, in terms of being able to distinguish parts of the codebase more easily. That is what the parent means by "easier to parse code."
> I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once
Exactly, everyone is different, as personally I'd hate cursive and ligatures. Think of it as, what works for you doesn't work for everyone, and what works for them (color) doesn't work for you. But let people have their preferences.
Agreed, they should be using color schemes that are TreeSitter compatible so for example "React" and "window.React" are not the exact same color, as they are semantically two different things.
99% of vscode themes are like the one he showed. IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color.
I'd need a citation for that statistic, and I'd also need to see which themes are actually used.
> IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color
And IMO, those are the worst themes.
These things are just preferences, but it is an objective fact that a good highlighting scheme makes certain information immediately visible, without requiring the reader to parse the actual characters. Whether or not this information is something you find helpful or annoying depends on your processing styles and preferences.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
I have about 1500 lines in my VSCode settings.json dedicated to custom syntax highlighting and text decorations (this could be trimmed, some is from before the days of semantic highlighting), but regardless, the amount of differentiation I can achieve with this is simply not possible on a light background. I've tried! (Solarized light is a nice theme though)
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.
During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.
The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
Books reflect ambient light. Monitor brightness should be set to a similar light level. You can hold a book next to the display and adjust accordingly.
I can count on one hand the number of monitors I've seen with auto brightness. The number of monitors with acceptable and non distracting auto brightness is zero.
I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.
> I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light.
Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
> During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm.
Yes, because they were physically unable to do anything else! A pixel could be either 100% off (black) or 100% on - and if you were unlucky the "on" was something obnoxious like bright green. The fact that basically everyone switched to light mode once it became feasible should be a hint that it wasn't just a designer fad.
> easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power
The sun is orders of magnitudes brighter - even when it isn't a blue-sky day. Human eyes evolved to deal with that without any issues (that's why your pupils can vary in size), so a desktop monitor shouldn't be a problem.
The problem is contrast. If you sit in a dark room with your monitor turned to 100% brightness and you're using a light theme of course your eyes are going to hurt. It's the same with those obnoxiously bright headlights we're seeing on cars these days! Sure, you could use dark mode, but the problem can also be solved by making sure the room is properly lit, or turning down the monitor's brightness. No need to pretend dark mode is a one-size-fits-all must-have solution for "ergonomics".
The same applies the other way as well, by the way: in my experience dark mode becomes completely unreadable in a brightly-lit environment - especially on glossy screens. You're constantly dealing with annoying reflections hiding your content.
Personally I've grown fond of the way MacOS and Android handle it: automatically switch to light mode while the sun is up, use dark mode during the night. It's not perfect in every situation, but 99% of the time it gets me what I want.
> Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
If your screen has built-in illumination then you might want to use a white-on-black theme. Mostly everything supports it, txt readers, epub readers, pdf readers (pdf.js not yet, but other pdf readers).
I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.
Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"
Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
Night Filter is an easy-to-use screen filter app for your Android device. Adjust brightness and colour, set up schedules, and reduce eye strain for comfortable night-time reading. [1]
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.
"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."
Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.
Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.
When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.
So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to
1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.
2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.
3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac
Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.
The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It was not a screen-saver. Less ghosting? Most likely. But the fact remains that reading text off of a light bulb blasting in your face all day sucks, and once upon a time people knew that... but "forgot" it when vendors shoved inverse color schemes on them by default.
"80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents"
Yes, I noted that; but the analogy to a piece of paper fails because paper does not EMIT light.
Everyone with sufficient computing experience calls "light" schemes inverted. This was even documented in instruction manuals from the early PC era: https://imgur.com/a/aLV8tn0
Anyone experienced remembers that any 60Hz CRT is a flickering mess, especially computer monitors that used shorter-lived phosphors, and any old TV had terrible burn-in. That's why you want to reduce the amount of bright pixels on it. That's not a legibility thing.
A display is not a light bulb if you aren't specifically making it a light bulb against the poorly lit environment. There's no difference between reflected and emitted light, what you actually need is much better lighting in the room, so your display doesn't stand out when used on a brightness level that provides sufficient contrast (and just because working in a poorly lit room is unhealthy).
Moreover, a light scheme in a well-lit environment is less eye-straining, because your pupils contract and adapt to the light. If you're using a dark display against a dark background, your eyes adapt to the dark and then you're hit with the bright text. If you want to display more than just text, dark mode becomes a problem because most of the content (e.g. pictures, videos) is not largely dark.
tl;dr avoid excessive contrast and flickering. Everything else is individual eyesight differences, opinions, and snake oil.
> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume
Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.
We also apply multiple kinds of normalisation to audio tracks to have them play at the appropriate level for their use case; so that the user doesn't have to adjust the volume when the TV switches from showing a war film, a panel show, a news program, a music channel, and a nature documentary - each is played with appropriate settings pre-baked relative to the others.
I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.
If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.
Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Most of the books I've read this year and last year had a somewhat yellow-ish tint to them (they were newly printed). I know I'm not the only person bothered by pure white paper in books.
I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
Yes, that's what's being discussed here. I'm disagreeing with the people who are defending using pure white as a background in light mode.
Pure black is more understandable, because it helps with battery life on mobile and notebooks, although I believe it shouldn't be the default dark mode.
There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum.
Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design…
Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness.
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
That’s why display brightness should be set such that it is similar to how a book page would look in comparable ambient lighting. “White” isn’t a specific brightness level.
Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account.
I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”
The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?
I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.
The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.
Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.
If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.
When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
I use pure 000000 and FFFFFF on an OLED monitor, contrast is fantastic. I agree though on general lackluster gray-based dark modes, they can be worse to read.
Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...
The only time I preferred light mode was as when I was on vacation in Florida and worked out of a sun room. I find myself normally working in low light environments which makes dark mode better overall. But it doesn’t have to be black background in fact I like the other “dark themes” that are darker shades of blue
Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me.
I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.
Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them?
(Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1].
Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.
This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.
Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.
If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.
I think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse.
As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc.
Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut.
I think it's a mental trap.
Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode, or the other way around in dark mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
You can adjust brightness and contrast so that 000000 looks like 333333 and FFFFFF looks like ECECEC. If that’s what feels comfortable to you, arguably that’s how it should be set.
No that’s wrong. If I’m looking at a photograph, then 000000 should look like 000000 and FFFFFF should look like FFFFFF. Sure FFFFFF is just blown highlights but that’s the photographer’s intention. Maybe I’m the photographer and I’m developing the RAW photo myself, and I need to see which settings result in such blown highlights.
But UI elements are different. UI designers should exercise restraint and not utilize the entire brightness range of my display. Setting the brightness and contrast from the display is wrong because it doesn’t know what kind of image is being displayed.
It’s not wrong. There is no absolute 000000 and FFFFFF. It’s relative to a white point and tone curve.
Of course, when you do color grading you want to have those fixed to whatever standard you are working with. But then you also have to control your ambient lighting accordingly, to get the correct impression of what you’re seeing. Even then, IPS displays aren’t capable of displaying true 000000, due to their backlight, or only very coarse-grained with local dimming zones.
Most people aren’t doing that kind of work, however.
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even.
If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white)
The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen.
I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
Eh I don't want any grays or browns, the black and white and orange theme I get from dark reader is great, actually looks good, even. I also went to the HN settings and set the orange header to 000000 too, haha.
For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred.
Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
My issue with running most monitors this dim is that colors look so much worse and contrast is lost. It’s not as much of a problem on my OLED phone though, which does tend toward the dimmer side. My desktop monitors (IPS) on the other hand are rarely below 50%.
I have never noticed that problem. But I always adjust brightness as part of a full color calibration, with ICC profile and everything, which probably makes a difference.
I will say that it took a bit to adjust to the first time I did it, but now it's painful to use any monitor at "full" 200+ nit brightness.
When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?
My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this).
However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night.
I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark.
In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it;
1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT.
2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`
3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK
If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white.
The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.
Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:
- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.
- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.
If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt.
It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.)
There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.
I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!"
Meanwhile:
- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application
- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.
- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.
I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.
Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
> So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
> but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
Not really anymore these days, because most use OLED, miniLED, or sufficiently good LCD tech that backlight bleed is not much of an issue.
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.
The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode
A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds.
And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way.
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
> Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS design to go back to it would probably be Yosemite. I don’t have any nostalgia for skeuomorphic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flattened design and blur effects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a substantial jump in brightness from previous versions.
Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite.
Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua.
This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best.
Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic.
P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it.
#000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark.
It's possible to have contrast too low, that doesn't mean maximum contrast is the best. Even HN doesn't go full black on white, the background is off-white.
i let my devices attempt to enforce this. Windows goes one further by automatically dimming my displays at a set time (it defaults to like 19:00 or 20:00). I wish my phone did this too, but i haven't found a way to have it do dim and undim automatically.
anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.
In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".
This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.
Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters..
QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
i play helldivers 2 on an HDR monitor and i nearly always balk at playing daytime missions because the in game light source "sun" literally hurts my eyes to look at.
However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps.
Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
> My eyes will thank you
Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily.
Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too.
But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.
I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite.
If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport
—
I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.”
Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.
Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
Monitors used to have easy rotary buttons to adjust brightness and contrast. Though I don’t remember it actually being necessary that often. Of course, the monitors rarely changed location.
In assuming you are not using your keyboard to set brightness because it’s an external display plugged into a laptop? Search for a DDC application for your desktop, it’s amazing, the brightness controls of your laptop will then control the external display as well. I use lunar on my MacBook, it was a revelation.
That’s not the problem. Analog dials were still easier and more convenient. I’m talking CRT days. Like these: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/M9cAAOSwrt5ncwpj/s-l1600.jpg
You could probably program keypad knobs like these to do the same: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71s7PGYBkkL._AC_SL1500_....
Or switch to HDR if you have a capable display.
I was pleasantly surprised that HDR also means you can control brightness - it is all software I that case!
And the brightness keys on an external Apple keyboard work.
According to my (limited) testing, you can only control brightness when the transfer function used on the HDR content you see is HLG. When it is PQ, the luminance seems to be “absolute” and ignores the display’s brightness settings.
> In assuming you are not using your keyboard to set brightness
I prefer buttons on the monitor.
Using a game comtroller to change brightness is like driving a car from the back seat.
If it helps, you can disable auto brightness in accessibility settings so that only manual change remains
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.
The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.
For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
> because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme.
That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants.
Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.
Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
It took a couple of days 10+ years ago to see what the fuss is about (I was an avid “christmas-lighter” before), and I never came back.
Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
Why though?
You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).
There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.
Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).
I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once (bold cursive if it is a parameter, god forbid): instant attention to what is usually a code-smell.
Code can be read without any syntax highlighting or text decoration, obviously. But adding those things is an additional information stream that makes processing faster and more reliable (redundancy in general has this effect).
As you said, it is especially useful for making certain code smells instantly visible at a glance.
I also find that different kinds of code will get different "color rhythms" (e.g. low-level algorithmic code vs. high-level code that calls a lot of functions vs. code that does a lot of operations / mutation of object or class properties) when syntax highlighting is properly semantic. This makes scanning for certain types of things (where objects are being mutated, where variables are introduced, etc) extremely fast, since you don't even need to read the characters.
I also find that rich syntax highlighting makes the codebase easier to remember, since the color (along with things like the line-lengths) gives each function a sort of unique visual texture.
Of course, all of this is personal preference. I am a very visual thinker so this kind of stuff helps a lot for me. Some people are far more verbal in their mental imagery or may remember code chunks solely based on semantics. Then, obviously, a bunch of color and/or text decorations might not matter much, or even just be a distraction.
In my usage, the coloring allows my eyes to “snap” to relevant chunks of code and restrict scanning to the bounds of those chunks.
Functionally it seems similar to spatial memory where landmarks are used as navigation shorthand and is impaired in circumstances where everything looks the same (e.g. in one of those sprawling suburbs with 100 of the same house).
I remember colors better than I remember names. It's a difference in how I process text, and for code where there's already 'types' of syntax, colors help differentiate between all those. It's not that I can't find the for loop, it's just that visually it becomes more distinct to me if all loops are a certain color. And class names are a certain color. And those colors tend to stand out better on a dark background than a light one. Reading light themes, or even unthemed code just feels like an additional chore that's solved pretty simply by using a dark theme.
No one needs it, but it's nice to have. It's the difference between being partially or fully colorblind or not being so, in terms of being able to distinguish parts of the codebase more easily. That is what the parent means by "easier to parse code."
> I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once
Exactly, everyone is different, as personally I'd hate cursive and ligatures. Think of it as, what works for you doesn't work for everyone, and what works for them (color) doesn't work for you. But let people have their preferences.
> as personally I'd hate cursive
Exactly the reason to fix the code so that there is only a single assignment and therefore no cursive :-)
Agreed, they should be using color schemes that are TreeSitter compatible so for example "React" and "window.React" are not the exact same color, as they are semantically two different things.
99% of vscode themes are like the one he showed. IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color.
I'd need a citation for that statistic, and I'd also need to see which themes are actually used.
> IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color
And IMO, those are the worst themes.
These things are just preferences, but it is an objective fact that a good highlighting scheme makes certain information immediately visible, without requiring the reader to parse the actual characters. Whether or not this information is something you find helpful or annoying depends on your processing styles and preferences.
> they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.
The older expression that'll find you some similarly-thinking individuals is "angry fruit salad".
Imagine some words, or even sentences, beginning with SHOUTING. Initial caps are nuts too -- B Dark.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
Ehhhm, just use solarized light if you need a good light theme...
I have about 1500 lines in my VSCode settings.json dedicated to custom syntax highlighting and text decorations (this could be trimmed, some is from before the days of semantic highlighting), but regardless, the amount of differentiation I can achieve with this is simply not possible on a light background. I've tried! (Solarized light is a nice theme though)
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.
During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.
The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
Books reflect ambient light. Monitor brightness should be set to a similar light level. You can hold a book next to the display and adjust accordingly.
That's an unreasonable ask. I'm not gonna fiddle with the brightness of my monitor throughout the day, thanks
If you control your ambient lighting or use automatic adjustment, you don’t have to.
I can count on one hand the number of monitors I've seen with auto brightness. The number of monitors with acceptable and non distracting auto brightness is zero.
I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.
> Books reflect ambient light.
Thanks! I always wondered how books worked.
> I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light.
Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
> During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm.
Yes, because they were physically unable to do anything else! A pixel could be either 100% off (black) or 100% on - and if you were unlucky the "on" was something obnoxious like bright green. The fact that basically everyone switched to light mode once it became feasible should be a hint that it wasn't just a designer fad.
> easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power
The sun is orders of magnitudes brighter - even when it isn't a blue-sky day. Human eyes evolved to deal with that without any issues (that's why your pupils can vary in size), so a desktop monitor shouldn't be a problem.
The problem is contrast. If you sit in a dark room with your monitor turned to 100% brightness and you're using a light theme of course your eyes are going to hurt. It's the same with those obnoxiously bright headlights we're seeing on cars these days! Sure, you could use dark mode, but the problem can also be solved by making sure the room is properly lit, or turning down the monitor's brightness. No need to pretend dark mode is a one-size-fits-all must-have solution for "ergonomics".
The same applies the other way as well, by the way: in my experience dark mode becomes completely unreadable in a brightly-lit environment - especially on glossy screens. You're constantly dealing with annoying reflections hiding your content.
Personally I've grown fond of the way MacOS and Android handle it: automatically switch to light mode while the sun is up, use dark mode during the night. It's not perfect in every situation, but 99% of the time it gets me what I want.
> Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
I do! And here's dark mode feature for one of them[1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
> Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
If your screen has built-in illumination then you might want to use a white-on-black theme. Mostly everything supports it, txt readers, epub readers, pdf readers (pdf.js not yet, but other pdf readers).
I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.
Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"
Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
Night Filter app is great
[1] https://nightfilter.app/Treat yourself to a new phone: they go as low as 1 nit nowdays.
Either you lower your display brightness or up your room lights — goal is the same: equal ambient and display brightness
My phone already goes down to 1 nit. 1 nit is still too bright
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
Have you tried high-CRI LEDs? I find that they are much closer to the incandescent lighting feel.
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.
"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."
Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.
Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.
When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.
So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to
1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.
2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.
3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac
Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.
The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It was not a screen-saver. Less ghosting? Most likely. But the fact remains that reading text off of a light bulb blasting in your face all day sucks, and once upon a time people knew that... but "forgot" it when vendors shoved inverse color schemes on them by default.
"80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents"
Yes, I noted that; but the analogy to a piece of paper fails because paper does not EMIT light.
Everyone with sufficient computing experience calls "light" schemes inverted. This was even documented in instruction manuals from the early PC era: https://imgur.com/a/aLV8tn0
Anyone experienced remembers that any 60Hz CRT is a flickering mess, especially computer monitors that used shorter-lived phosphors, and any old TV had terrible burn-in. That's why you want to reduce the amount of bright pixels on it. That's not a legibility thing.
A display is not a light bulb if you aren't specifically making it a light bulb against the poorly lit environment. There's no difference between reflected and emitted light, what you actually need is much better lighting in the room, so your display doesn't stand out when used on a brightness level that provides sufficient contrast (and just because working in a poorly lit room is unhealthy).
Moreover, a light scheme in a well-lit environment is less eye-straining, because your pupils contract and adapt to the light. If you're using a dark display against a dark background, your eyes adapt to the dark and then you're hit with the bright text. If you want to display more than just text, dark mode becomes a problem because most of the content (e.g. pictures, videos) is not largely dark.
tl;dr avoid excessive contrast and flickering. Everything else is individual eyesight differences, opinions, and snake oil.
> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume
Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.
We also apply multiple kinds of normalisation to audio tracks to have them play at the appropriate level for their use case; so that the user doesn't have to adjust the volume when the TV switches from showing a war film, a panel show, a news program, a music channel, and a nature documentary - each is played with appropriate settings pre-baked relative to the others.
I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.
If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.
Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background.
If I could get books inverted, I would.
I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
> That's because paper used to print books isn't always white.
Isn't it basically rule #1 of UX design to never use pure white / pure black?
Yes, that's what's being discussed here. I'm disagreeing with the people who are defending using pure white as a background in light mode.
Pure black is more understandable, because it helps with battery life on mobile and notebooks, although I believe it shouldn't be the default dark mode.
There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum.
Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design…
Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness.
Example meta reviews:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today.
It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers.
It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
That’s why display brightness should be set such that it is similar to how a book page would look in comparable ambient lighting. “White” isn’t a specific brightness level.
You are aware that many of us use our displays for more than just reading text? And often multiple things at a time?
Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account.
I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.
If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black.
A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.
Exactly. Contrast or, more precisely, the dynamic range we desire, is ruined by dimming displays enough not to cause pain and fatigue.
It's a dumb solution, and we may all safely ignore it, knowing it won't occur. "Dark mode" haters will just have to cope as dark becomes the default.
> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black.
Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you).
Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
My mirror disagrees.
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
The retina can't tell the difference between reflected light and emitted light
Unless you're in the habit of reading your books with a flashlight, the context makes it very different.
Books reflect light, not emit it.
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”
The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?
I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.
The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.
Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.
If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.
When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
I use pure 000000 and FFFFFF on an OLED monitor, contrast is fantastic. I agree though on general lackluster gray-based dark modes, they can be worse to read.
Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?
Yep
Yes, I do!
I also see the horizontal lines.
I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...
The only time I preferred light mode was as when I was on vacation in Florida and worked out of a sun room. I find myself normally working in low light environments which makes dark mode better overall. But it doesn’t have to be black background in fact I like the other “dark themes” that are darker shades of blue
I definitely feel that during the day but have the inverse experience when the sun has set (light mode feels unbearable after dark).
I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it
There can be other causes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_palinopsia. I think mine is caused by HPPD, but I can't say for sure
same here. sometimes it makes me feels guilty for using light mode. Maybe we should yell out something like "hold-on can't see anything"
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me.
I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.
Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them?
(Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
CRTs had already pretty much fallen out of use as computer monitors in 2006.
16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).
> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were…
Things people born after Macintosh say.
True. This was how my first computer was [1]
I didn’t call it dark mode though!
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1].
Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.
This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.
Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.
If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
>> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were…
>Things people born after Macintosh say.
Things people born after teleprompters say.
Yep the first OS I (the author) used was the delightful beige of Windows 98
Exactamundo.
I think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse.
As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc.
Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut.
I think it's a mental trap.
Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode, or the other way around in dark mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
You can adjust brightness and contrast so that 000000 looks like 333333 and FFFFFF looks like ECECEC. If that’s what feels comfortable to you, arguably that’s how it should be set.
No that’s wrong. If I’m looking at a photograph, then 000000 should look like 000000 and FFFFFF should look like FFFFFF. Sure FFFFFF is just blown highlights but that’s the photographer’s intention. Maybe I’m the photographer and I’m developing the RAW photo myself, and I need to see which settings result in such blown highlights.
But UI elements are different. UI designers should exercise restraint and not utilize the entire brightness range of my display. Setting the brightness and contrast from the display is wrong because it doesn’t know what kind of image is being displayed.
It’s not wrong. There is no absolute 000000 and FFFFFF. It’s relative to a white point and tone curve.
Of course, when you do color grading you want to have those fixed to whatever standard you are working with. But then you also have to control your ambient lighting accordingly, to get the correct impression of what you’re seeing. Even then, IPS displays aren’t capable of displaying true 000000, due to their backlight, or only very coarse-grained with local dimming zones.
Most people aren’t doing that kind of work, however.
I agree for text content, but not for UI chrome and UI controls and forms/dialogs. Background color is useful to distinguish between UI and content.
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even.
If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white)
The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen.
I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
Eh I don't want any grays or browns, the black and white and orange theme I get from dark reader is great, actually looks good, even. I also went to the HN settings and set the orange header to 000000 too, haha.
For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred.
Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`
Yes! And the designs themselves are being constrained to aesthetics that can look pretty good in light or dark mode.
I wonder how much brighter (nits) screens have become over the same period as well.
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
My issue with running most monitors this dim is that colors look so much worse and contrast is lost. It’s not as much of a problem on my OLED phone though, which does tend toward the dimmer side. My desktop monitors (IPS) on the other hand are rarely below 50%.
I have never noticed that problem. But I always adjust brightness as part of a full color calibration, with ICC profile and everything, which probably makes a difference.
I will say that it took a bit to adjust to the first time I did it, but now it's painful to use any monitor at "full" 200+ nit brightness.
When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?
Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?
Flanderization?
My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this).
However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night.
I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark.
In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it;
1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT.
2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`
3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK
If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white.
The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.
Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:
- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.
- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.
If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt.
It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.)
There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.
I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!"
Meanwhile:
- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application
- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.
- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.
I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
This has some questionable methodology.
That’s a non-gamma-corrected average, which generally doesn’t give good results.But also:
> What I’ve graphed here is just the brightness of the window chrome, which isn’t really representative of the actual total screen brightness.
No kidding. Also, Mac OS keeps changing the chrome, and this isn’t obviously a very useful measurement.
The root cause may just be the increase in dead space caused by mobile first UIs.
No.
The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.
Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
> So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
> but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
Not really anymore these days, because most use OLED, miniLED, or sufficiently good LCD tech that backlight bleed is not much of an issue.
>Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
You know what sucks? They do. Desktops do. They have since the late 90s.
Microsoft just never implemented it. Most desktop displays happily respond to brightness commands from the OS over DDCCI.
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.
The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
I picked the window chrome from Safari or Finder for each version, as similar as I could get to the highlighted area in the screenshot.
My intent was to capture the shade of the non-content area in the window.
There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode
A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
> A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI.
This could be correct if astigmatism was rare.[1]
[1] https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds.
And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way.
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
> Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS design to go back to it would probably be Yosemite. I don’t have any nostalgia for skeuomorphic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flattened design and blur effects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a substantial jump in brightness from previous versions.
Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite.
Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua.
This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best.
Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic.
P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it. #000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark.
Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
> improve legibility
Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not. (Update: it became black again)
There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
It's possible to have contrast too low, that doesn't mean maximum contrast is the best. Even HN doesn't go full black on white, the background is off-white.
They did not claim not enough contrast is impossible.
I use light mode during the day and dark mode in the evening, with the OS switching automatically based on the sun’s position.
To me, this seems like the obvious way to decide when to use dark mode, but apparently I’m in a very small minority.
i let my devices attempt to enforce this. Windows goes one further by automatically dimming my displays at a set time (it defaults to like 19:00 or 20:00). I wish my phone did this too, but i haven't found a way to have it do dim and undim automatically.
anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.
"Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes" (2020), 300 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33947820
In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".
Also shown on the chart, to a smaller degree. And more noticeable on mobile probably where there's lots of OLEDs and concern about battery usage.
This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.
Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters..
QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.
I suspect the trend would be even more extreme if multiplied by typical screen brightness over time!
i play helldivers 2 on an HDR monitor and i nearly always balk at playing daytime missions because the in game light source "sun" literally hurts my eyes to look at.
However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps.
Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."
> people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better
Astigmatism is very common.