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Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

I use solarized light everywhere. It sounds silly because everyone likes using a dark theme but I do it on purpose because I'm often coding from a bus stop or somewhere else outside. With a light theme it's much easier to see the screen even with full sun and glare on the screen. This is not possible with the dark theme.

I also have glare coming through a window at work that is in a new office and so there's no window blinds yet. The solarized light theme helps me continue to be able to see what's on my screen no matter what's happening and I appreciate that.

I'll switch back to a dark theme if I need to when I'm on a long trip and it's at night and I'm in the car so I don't disturb the driver with my screen.

I like that I can switch back and forth with using the same theme and that the light theme is so well thought out.

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I too use Solarized Light. Apart from better readability outside, another reason for me to use the light theme is that many other things I look at use a light theme (eg HN), and switching between my terminal/ide with a dark theme and a browser with (usually) light websites was jarring.

Almost everything has a dark theme for me, including HN - sites I use regularly which don't have their own dark themes will get overridden with Minimalist.

How does HN have a dark theme? I suppose one's browser sends their light/dark preferences or websites send alternate stylesheets? How does one set it in Chrome? chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark didn't work for me.

What's Minimalist?

Whenever I saw anyone attempting to have everything dark, half the things looked awful, the dark theme was not even an afterthought...

HN does not itself have one, that's the point of the Minimalist mention. It's an extension that lets you override parts of any website. On looking at what is actually active for me on HN, it's actually another extension I use, named Stylus, (which does much of the same thing, but Stylus is focused on just the CSS while Minimalist also lets people provide modules which provides a list of options to turn on/off) which provides the Dark HN theme. I've gone back and forth between a couple of different ones over the years, and one of the older ones was Minimalist, but the one I use now is apparently Stylus -- been a few years since I touched the settings.

Stylus is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

You can find themes to suit you here: https://uso.kkx.one/browse/styles?search=Hackernews (or search for any other site you might want to alter)

> Whenever I saw anyone attempting to have everything dark, half the things looked awful, the dark theme was not even an afterthought...

That's exactly why you pretty much need an extension like Stylus or Minimalist to get proper themes made by people who cares what the sites end up looking like.

Thank you for the thorough explanation!

I use the same, solarized light is surprisingly easy to read when sitting on a patio or at a coffee shop.

Slight tangent, but you're OFTEN coding from a bus stop?! Why?

Because I commute home on a bus. Public transportation is part of my daily commute and I like coding in my spare time.

I'm jealous of your ability to avoid motion sickness!

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