Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

is the background color really the problem? I though screen brightness was a more issue, for example: continue using your light theme but lower down the brightness, most of your websites are going to be white backgrounds, switch between dark and light background frequently strains more the eyes, looking for the link where I read this.

View on HN

In my own experience, many devices either:

* do not offer granular enough control of the brightness on the low end (the backlight is either kind of dim, or nearly/completely off, with no in-between setting), or they

* do not have enough contrast at low brightness to read easily.

In either case, the display is more readable by having the backlight on bright, and darkening most of the display (by changing the background color).

Of course, this does not apply to all displays, but every display has pretty fine control its total light output by changing the colors it is displaying.

Agreed, and for this reason I use Lumen: https://github.com/anishathalye/lumen

On my Atari I made a program to invert all colors with a button combination so I could switch between applications as needed. There are some programs around that does that in windows now. If you have nVidia drivers they can invert but I don't think that can be done with a button. Windows magnifyer has an inverter built in too.

f.lux nicely takes away only the blue light but this isn't always enough for the bright backgrounds of modern homepages and text editors.

I use the browser extension 'dark background light text' [1] for that reason. Works OK, far from perfect, but helps quite a bit.

[1] https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com