Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

I don't like dark mode. There are always lots of apps and websites that haven't adopted the color guidelines, so I'll frequently be snapping from dark black/grey to bright white, which is even harder on my eyes than just white all the time. Turning down screen brightness is better I think.

View on HN

I really appreciate when an OS, app or site implements dark mode. My OS comes by default in dark mode, I use VSCode with a dark theme, I set dark mode in apps that support it (twitter, reddit, gmail, etc). I have 2 monitors side by side (2560x1440 and 3440x1440) and it's really a lot of light to take in when there is no dark mode available.

I like to read a lot during night time, and it was hard not to get burning eyes after a couple of hours.

But I learned about toning down screen brightness as to not get headaches, then I learned about Redshift which it's been a real life---or should I say eyes?---saver.

I even implemented a dark / light mode for my personal blog: https://lobotuerto.com/

In don't like dark mode because I find it slower to scan a large section of code and recognise some pattern I'm looking for.

The last time I mentioned this I got some downvotes so what I will say is that perception is one of the areas where just because someone may be one of the few to experience a phenomenon doesn't mean that they are incorrect. It's subjective!

In most cases just switching the color scheme will slow you down. So going by that, if you spend enough time in dark mode, switching to light will also be slower.

Also, you can't just reuse the same colors for syntax highlighting in dark mode. Saturation needs to be turned down compared to light mode or everthing looks like a mess of colors.

Companies can also easily forget lessons previously learned. For example, Firefox's old dark theme was light grey text on dark grey background. Their current default dark theme is blazing white text on dark grey background. It's far less pleasant on the eyes.

It seems that more people are moving to dark mode. I use Tampermonkey here on HN so I can view it in dark mode.

Maybe some day HN will see the light and implement native dark mode. :)

For websites, I use the Dark Reader extension, which does an incredible job turning any website into a dark version. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

My main annoyance these days is that Office doesn’t let you invert the colors of a document as a display option. You have to actually change the background and text colors of the document.

I wish operating systems had a feature to invert the colors in a single window/app, as a fallback for when an application doesn’t have a dark mode.

I've tried Dark Reader and a few other similar extensions and found that they caused my fan to regularly spin up (2017 MBP, running Brave browser). Am I doing something wrong, or is this a common experience?

For years a new Chrome window would flash white regardless of any extensions or settings. Following the issue it seemed to almost be fundamental to how rendering is done. Does it still do that?

You can do something like use a Stylish Global Dark style[1] to force all websites to use a dark theme.

That way you'll never be forced to see a website in bright white again.

[1] - https://userstyles.org/styles/163880/global-dark-style-every...

On the other hand it's not as easy to adjust brightness on desktop monitors so I appreciate having the option either way.

Software brightness control on desktop monitors is something I've wanted for a while. Closest thing I've seen is a monitor with a built in light sensor that has the option of auto adjusting independent of the computer.

Is this still not common? I have an Apple Cinema Display from 15 years ago and it has both hardware brightness controls (on the right edge), and software brightness control (keyboard f-keys, labeled as such on Apple keyboards).

It has long been possible to adjust the brightness of monitors through software. The trouble is that laptop displays and external displays do it in two different ways, and the external monitor one is pretty much unknown and unused by normal software.

Taking my laptop as an example: Windows has two APIs for adjusting screen brightness, one of which only works for the internal display and one of which only works for external displays; and sadly the brightness keys on the laptop are uninterceptable and I have not come up with any way of linking the brightnesses either. I went hunting and settled on some old freeware called ScreenBright which I can invoke from the command line, so that now I just run `b 0` for night time and `b 40` for most of the day (and up to 70% in certain seasons—but 100% is pretty much always too bright where I use my external displays). Since I arranged that workflow, I have also written a tiny Rust program that interacts with the APIs directly which could replace it.

>and sadly the brightness keys on the laptop are uninterceptable

This doesn't seem to be true for most laptops. The ones I have used show a OS graphic when you turn the brightness down similar to the volume. Have tested this using linux on a dell xps and a macbook.

Unfortunately both still do not adjust the brightness of external monitors.

On my previous laptop I ran Arch Linux with i3, and handled the XF86Brightness keys myself. But at present I’m using Windows, and I haven’t found any means of intercepting the keys: Windows handles them in some way that prevents me from handling them myself.

If only monitors invented some rotating things for adjusting brightness and contrast.

It's been a very long time since I used a monitor with any sort of rotating dial.

The trend for decades now has been to have buttons only, and often there's a menu you have to navigate through in order to actually get to the brightness settings. It's a real hassle on many monitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com