Having tried it for a few minutes, I prefer the light theme.
I also reverted back to light themes for my text editors - I felt it was easier to focus on dark-on-light text than the other way around.
I also reverted back to light themes for my text editors - I felt it was easier to focus on dark-on-light text than the other way around.
I find the whole dark mode fashion pretty unfathomable. I use it only in the dark and it's wonderful in that case, but people seem to want it on all the time for all the things.
When I'm on my balcony in the sun, I use a light theme. But that's only a few hours a day during the summer. Most of the time I'm indoors with the lights low and my themes dark.
I get it in dark rooms, but I get the sense there is this trend where people like dark mode because they like dark mode and they don't care what time of day it is. Seems more like fashion than anything practical, though I can certainly understand there is a practical application to it, and giving users control of it is good.
As for 'at work', it's been my experience that offices generally aren't very bright. Not even remotely as bright as daylight, nor even as bright as electric lighting could be. Those overhead florescent bulbs produce a harsh shade of light.. but not all that much of it. That's why people squint or put on sunglasses when they walk out of office buildings during the day.
Everything matches, even notepad.
At night, if I find the glaring brightness hurts my eyes even at the minimum level my LCD will allow, I just invert the screen colors - and everything still matches!
That's a bullshit argument when you're talking about technology thousands of years old made with material constraints. How would parchment be rendered black, smear it with soot, which would then rub off on everything it touched? Would you instead ink the entire page? Would something other than parchment be used, and if so what? And what white pigments would have lent themselves to writing? With dark ink you have numerous options, some of them cheaper than dirt. For white pigments you're looking at chalk or lead oxides, neither of which is nearly as available as a little charcoal.
I'm not disputing that for non-emissive text, dark on light is better. But our culture adopting this scheme had a lot more to do with materials that were available in the past than anything else. The alternative wasn't evaluated because it was simply less practical to implement.
As long as designers understand and support both light and dark, it's good to have the option.
For me, any time I pop open HN or Google Drive, my eyes have to take a second to adjust to the glaring brightness compared to everything else on the screen.
There's no absolute reason why the evolution happened that way that I can say. It was all more or less arbitrary design decisions.
Computing with “light mode” preceded video terminals!
Image: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/21/...
I don't know how common this was, or if it's something that was unique to these sparcstations.