Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002 (2015)

Yep :)

It still stands out, even among all the current screenshots.

I have to wonder whether that research took into consideration how large and bright modern displays are, and for the duration that modern IT professionals are using them for.

I would guess that the majority of these people would have been using 15-19" CRT monitors, and mostly single displays.

In pretty much every office that I've seen, most people have two or three 23-27" displays. Modern LCD panels are also extremely bright.

Staring at that much screen realestate with primarily light/white colours can be painful for long periods of time. It certainly feels less uncomfortable to use a darker theme.

When you're reading a block of text, you interact much less with the background than when you're searching and jumping between lines.

On my phone with an OLED screen I still prefer white-on-black, but that's mainly because even at the lowest brightness it is still far too bright at night.

Using vi for 5y here (switched to neovim) in dark mode, with nofrils-dark[1] theme now, I don’t feel any less productive, on the contrary I can focus for way longer than before.

[1] https://github.com/robertmeta/nofrils/blob/master/README.md

Everything "young developers" nowadays do seem to me a weird '70s throwback - from the proliferation of the command line (as opposed to actually trying to create advanced GUI tools for people who know what they are doing, like a lot of developers did in the late 90s/early 2000s whereas today you mainly have dumbed down GNOME 3 lookalikes), to using tiling and lightweight window managers "for performance" on "low end computers" when those low end computers have massive supercomputer abilities compared to the computers that people used -again- in the 90s with UIs that did WAY more stuff despite their limited performance, to having crude dumb TUIs that look and behave worse than what you'd get in DOS in the 80s, etc.

Do you know research validating or contracting these claims:

- light text on dark background in dark room better

- dark text in light background in bright room is better

- light text on dark background is better when refresh rate is low

- the font size changes the situation.

My personal experience after some testing is that light on dark with slightly larger monospace font that 'feels right' [1] leads to fastest long term reading and comfort. Also light on dark background is always better in dark room. Otherwise dark on light is better. Back in a day when we all had low resolution CRT monitors font size was large for everyone and light on dark was common.

[1] If I just sit in a monitor and set up my programming environment I settle to text size that I can read well but is still relatively small. It seems reasonable that you want to see more text. But if I choose little bigger font than what 'feels' right I can read faster. Large font, light on dark background seems optimal.

This is also my theory. My theory is that "hacker signals" like dark backgrounds, tricked-out shell config, and using vim are more common in language communities where people feel insecure about their claim to technical status - or rather, about the acceptance by others of their entirely legitimate claim - such as those of Ruby and JavaScript.

Wouldn't the change in display technology from CRT to LCD make a huge difference? I'm not suggesting the ergonomics research from the era was wrong, but a new study could come up with very different recommendations today.

Blooming, for kids these days, is when the HV supply of a CRT is poorly regulated in a constant-power sense and changes in display brightness cause changes in electron beam current cause fluctuation in acceleration voltage literally make the screen zoom in and out a couple percent while under high load. The poor regulation was usually worse under high current demand, so you could "clear ; top" a black background and there would be no weird zoom effects but a white background might zoom flutter in and out as the content of the screen varied. Very annoying to have one window flutter a little because another had its content change.

Interference and weird aliasing problems showed up in vast fields of illuminated white background more than unlit black background. Retrace lines looked particularly awful on large fields of white. Yes there's a clamping circuit that SHOULD totally shut off the beam on vert-retrace but as you'd expect it looked awful on a $200 CRT monitor and beautiful on a $1000+ monitor. Its just not noticeable on a black background.

There was also a filtering effect, light backgrounds having terrible image quality, a tech giant of 2002 spent decades staring into mostly black background terminals so anyone who in 2019 would not be able to stand black backgrounds was simply filtered out of the pool of possible tech giants back in that era. If you couldn't stare into the abyss of a TRS-80 model III black background sorta low res CRT display for 40+ hours per week, you simply had to leave the computing field in 1981, for example.

The only times we used light backgrounds on CRTs was for non-text purposes (games) and very strange lighting problems (the hated glossy screen with a light source reflected into your eyes, perhaps a very bright CRT background would reduce the massive glare distraction)

To some extent USABLE white background on a CRT was conspicuous consumption in that it was unusable on a $250 monitor or a TV connected to a 1980s home computer but usable white background CRT meant someone bought a $1000+ fancy name brand monitor. Anyone could have a decent black background display regardless of personal wealth but a white background meant you wanted everyone to know you had money, or at least you had money before you spent it, LOL.

WRT conspicuous consumption I was multi-monitor back to the 80s (aka multiple machine on desk) and CRTs were an absolute nightmare where a 70 hz monitor next to a 60 hz monitor made both unreadable or in some ways it was even worse to have a 60.01 hz VGA card next to a 59.99 hz card because then you'd get a magnetic interference crawlie that crept up the screen slowly like a visual hallucination. The tech giants in the linked article were not doing tech work (generally) as most listed people most were (generally) managers and as such having one monitor on a desk for gnatt chart manipulation and email and such was typical for managers of that era, even if the techie front line personnel had three (or more) monitors on their desk.

One of the most interesting interior design aspects of the CRT to LCD transition about two decades ago is my multiple monitors on my desk at home went from as far separated as possible to as close as possible due to no more interference. Roughly as interesting was the transition from 4:3 monitors to wide TV aspect ratios.

As someone who used dark themes with CRTs whenever possible in the ‘90s, my theory is simply that those studies you mention were academic horseshit - CRTs with bright backgrounds were eye-killers. Well, they were eye-killers in general, but more when set with bright backgrounds.

Unfortunately, colorbleed in small-size text made it a bit more difficult to read text on dark backgrounds, but that could be somewhat compensated with larger fonts if you had a big enough display. So basically you could choose two different ways to kill yourself, but one of them gave you a chance if you were rich enough (and lucky enough - most programs on Windows never allowed you to change their white background). Man, CRT was so shit.

LCDs are much better in general, and occasionally worse (a lot of games make my eyes cry, with their aggressively shiny palettes). I still prefer dark out of habit in most cases, but it really depends on the monitor (and its calibration) and the surroundings. Saying one mode or the other is superior in all circumstances is silly, imho. And certainly wouldn’t bash millennials, or question their geek-manliness, for choosing this or that mode.

I don't think one is necessarily better than the other "in general" but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

- White background might be better on more illuminated environments. Too much contrast is bad

- Syntax highlighting is easier to resolve on a dark background

[citation needed]

I have no strong opinion on this subject, but I'd be interested in more data.

Dark themes are much better for my eyes.

Having a hard time believing any research suggesting otherwise. Would surprise me, to say the least.

Also, this is anecdotal - I have 240Hz monitor, and since I started using it (couple of years), I have less eye strain. It could be the refresh rate, or it could be this particular monitor somehow (the quality or whatever). I am not sure.

Basically, 240Hz + dark background + light text + low brightness is ideal for my eyes, based on my experience.

(n.b. I'm not weighing in on whether one white-on-black or black-on-white is more ergonomic, I'm just saying that it's rare that someone preference is actually grounded in ergonomics)

There's no shame in having an aesthetic preference, nor in sacrificing some ergonomics to realize it. If people always preferred ergonomics to aesthetics, everyone would be wearing New Balance shoes (I'm a happy owner of a pair). Your system UI and your code editor is something you stare at a lot, and it's reasonable to want it to look good.

There are studies that have shown that in the lab. Meaning that it's worked out that way under whatever conditions were present in the lab, which aren't necessarily the same as the conditions in one's workplace. Real life is probably messier.

For example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/are-dark-themes-better-for-ey...

I think dark text on a light background looks better in my Kobo. It is a device that looks great on a sunny day.

But I prefer light text on a dark background in Sublime Text when reading on the laptop screen. Different technologies, different light profiles.

Maybe what you want and need is an e-ink laptop screen.

"I want to be different"... just like the millions of others who also choose that font.

There's a personal finance app I use that was recently modernised, and it went from being able to show me 50 transactions on a 1920x1080 screen to barely being able to display little over 10 transactions at a time. No improvement, just... padding.

As years went by, I started to remove everything. I now use an automatic tiling window manager with no borders. I actively disable all animations, and I use colors much more thoughtfully (color yes, but only where it is needed), so that by default my laptop looks a lot more like those old screenshots than a today colorful tablet.

I'm now quite pedantic on how text should be rendered the way _I_ want, and it should be the same _everywhere_.

So in a sense, I see why the current look is attractive and my younger-self would approve, but in retrospective the bland-but-consistent look is what I eventually moved on to by choice for a lot of reasons.

The current UI trend in my mind is considerably worse from an UI perspective than what Windows 3.1/95 (and same-era DEs) would offer.

The things in person in real life, on the other hand, have become much more interesting!

My toaster is also boring, and my pipe wrench, and my floor jack. Just tools.