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I think the rise of dark mode is mostly related to really good displays. Dark mode looks like shit on CRTs and even older flat panels with poor contrast.

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Light modes were arguably worse on CRTs, especially if the refresh was 60Hz or less. I couldn't take Word for Windows at all seriously until Windows NT and 85Hz CRTs appeared.

I currently use both light and dark themes on Emacs, with a shortcut to toggle between them. Solarised is a great theme for this, as the text colours are the same for both modes. I originally started using a light theme during the day, as so many other apps already do and I disliked the sudden change in brightness when for example switching between Emacs and a web browser.

I used to dislike dark backgrounds, but now I have several apps set to dark mode. But going way back to the 80s, terminals were mostly dark mode. CRTs mostly looked terrible with bright backgrounds until the Mac.

I don't know if my own change in preference is due to underlying change in screen technology, or something else. Screen time might affect it too -- maybe people prefer light mode when they're only on-screen a few hours a day, but dark mode is better when using it all day?

I think about the default IRIX UIs from the mid-90s[1, 2]. These were embraced by a professional subset of users that likely paid attention to detail and wanted minimal distraction from their work, however subtle it might be.

Dark UIs likely made ghosting more prominent on CRTs, either because of crosstalk on a D-SUB cable or because of "spillover" of bright elements of a UI into a nearby dark field. I agree with your sentiment that technological change has made this possible.

Tangentially, I wanted to mention a hue shift that I've noticed that that all UIs seem to flow through. I will take the evolution of Aqua for example. UIs seem to start off with some variant of lighter blue or green (10.0) that eventually iterates into a darker but more saturated form of itself (10.4). Eventually, we start getting hints of purple (10.5, 10.6). When purple starts to come through, there are really no colours to introduce and designers usually decide it's time for a UI overhaul. I would love to hear others' takes on this.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Lzlbyp9.jpg [2] http://retronet.altervista.org/retronet/ss/ss_irix_shake.png

There was blue mode for a while. I remember using of Norton Commander, Turbo Pascal, where blue mode was the default and quite popular.

I suspect a lot of that happened because people started adding color when color monitors became a more common option, and blue being the least offensive of the alternatives available if you wanted to add a background color...

And classic Word Perfect 5.

If you had a low-resolution display with visible scan lines, as most text terminals did, then you had a stripy light background, which was pretty bad. But a high-resolution gapless display on a reasonably adjusted CRT was great.

> Dark mode looks like shit on CRTs and even older flat panels with poor contrast.

I think you got it backwards. I remember using black backgrounds and things like "mc -b" specifically because CRTs I used sucked at light colors, trinitron displays later were nicer though and using white backgrounds was pleasant. Nowadays led backlit displays suck again on light and bright colors and don't seem to improve, hence "dark mode" became a solution.

And OLEDs in particular, where black stops transmitting light at all. (And saves power, too.)

An OLED and a dark default would probably also reduce insomnia.

I don't know about you guys, but Night Shift at max setting is still too blue for me. I end up turning the brightness down. I just need to switch to dark.

Heck yeah. Totally agree. For my app I'm working on dark true dark modes and then try to do true dark/true black on mobile.

Black looks much better on mobile IMO ...

Neat tidbit that I learned while working on dark mode at my company. Don't use true black. It looks amazing on OLED screens at rest but it results in a weird sluggish appearance when scrolling. This is because there is a lag time between pixels going from off to on.

The material team at Google made a blog post about it which I recommend going through: https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html

The quote around the OLED: "On OLED screens, turning pixels on and off can cause a delay when the screen is scrolled, making the pixels blur."

As an example, the facebook messenger app uses a true black background and the delay is _very_ noticeable.

And non-OLEDs by exception, where black means shining a light at a black surface for maximum device heating.

Plus you can't burn in what you didn't turn on.

But you can burn in the turned on pixels can't you? Do the LEDs lose luminance with age?

They do sadly, which is why you wanna keep them off, or I suppose burn them all out at the same rate. I know my OLED TV actually does a burn-in balancing once I turn it off.

CRTs had way better contrast and brightness than the early LCDs. And since CRTs don't excite phosphors on black pixels you could literally extend the life of your monitor (and spare your eyeballs) by using dark mode.

OTOH, nowadays most displays are glary and dark mode in a non-dark environment lets these display act as a mirror. As a cynic I assume we live in a time of narcissistic personality disorder ;)

With the bright mode I can reduce the brightness of my screens and I can still read everything. I also never have the urge to put dark-mode code on presentation slides that are unreadable in all but perfect condition.

I definitely agree. I was thinking this the other day when thinking about how 'white' must have felt like 'paper' back in the day. Also, the issue WRT dark not really being dark.

You're right that without LCDs , especially OLED, dark mode wouldn't really be a thing.

Yeah I was going to mention that. Devs usually have Mac Books, XPS, X1 Carbons, modern screens blasting 500 nits. Most real people have sh8tty TN panels or old small monitors.

> Most real people have sh8tty TN panels or old small monitors.

And light text on dark background looks better on these too.

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