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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Simply make text bigger.

125% DPI or 125% "zoom" depending on the OS/application help with eye strain massively, and it surprises me how few colleagues are willing to try it (e.g. "I can see perfectly, why would I increase text size?!").

Between that and lowering a monitor's brightness to below 50% (often around 35% depending on brand), are my biggest tips. Windows now has a blue light filter built right in (Settings -> System -> Display -> Night Light).

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> Simply make text bigger.

This is astonishingly effective at reducing eye strain. Even if you can read small text on your screen, it requires a lot of work by the muscles in your eyes to maintain the focus long term. Larger text means less precise focusing is required to be able to read the text.

This. At some point I noticed that at the end of the work day my eyes were excessively tired more often than not. This simple change of making reading easier by zooming in just a little made a huge difference.

I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who does this. I also enable the find the cursor feature because with multiple monitors I tend to squint to hunt for it otherwise.

I did it the other way... Bought a cheap 4k@60Hz 50 inch TV ... cost me around AUD$400. I was doing multi screen before, but I like this better I have effectively 4x 1080p screens in a 2x2 array. The only downside is the tv forgets my backlight preferences on any source change or power cycle.

Great point. I read HN at 160% zoom on FF.

...80%, personally. Even 100 looks comical on most sites, I can't imagine using 160%.

But I think this is too dependent on monitor, system font, etc. to generalise.

I use 125% on HN with a 23" 1920x1080 monitor. HN text is comically small.

Not just reduce the monitor brightness, but also use "dark mode" whenever possible. I read a lot on the web, and found the darkreader extension incredibly useful for my eyes strain.

Dark mode is effectively the same as lowering brightness. If you can lower the brightness to match dark mode's light intensity, it should feel about the same.

There are some sources suggesting that all other things equal, black text on white is more legible too.

Surely though, for a given total light intensity, dark mode allows for much higher contrast than the corresponding light mode?

after going back and forth between "black on white" and "white on black", I ended up at "black on gray"

Yes. And while you're at it, use double line spacing in your IDE too. You can feel the strain lessen.

I'm on a 4k screen. You just convinced me to move from 125% to 150% scaling.

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