Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)
kevquirk.com
kevquirk.com
Thanks but I'll let the scientific process play itself out over time. In the mean time, I appreciate that the public debate has induced phones, apps, and many web sites to give me the option to enjoy reading things all day without eye strain.
The fact that more stuff defaults dark mode or follows a system setting also means I spend less time having to re-style sites with a browser plugin.
This is probably already an endless back and forth like the editor wars but I'm okay with that as the long term status quo. It'll mean that most designers learn that they just have to use themes and include an option for either preference. Some even go as far as making their sites look good in both modes. It pleases my counter-culture senses to see them exploring more angles on the color wheel.
I don't think anyone is forcing anyone to do anything. If you want to smoke cigarettes, you have the license to do so. But that doesn't mean there aren't objective reasons no to do so.
Generally speaking, preferences aren't beyond scrutiny or axiomatic, or outside rational consideration. If a preference is meaningfully harmful (dark mode probably does not qualify), then in a rational person it tends to shift accordingly once the harmfulness is understood. Stubborn irrational preferences (like those that involve addiction) may require some effort or intervention to recondition them to conform with our objective good. At the very least, we ought to avoid indulging them.
And the healthy intelligent person invariably conforms to the consensus.
Is that how it is?
Au contraire, the problem is literally that we are forcing people. People are claiming medical issues (on both sides), too, so this is probably going to end up in some future debates about accessibility rules/laws.
You have the right to put a flashlight up to your eyes for 8 hours/day, you do not have the same right to do this to me.
It's ridiculous to think that all our eyes are the same, and that some study can determine what is best for everyone.
And it's not that I've only used light modes and don't know any better. Our eyes and preferences change over time.
I grew up on what might be called "light modes": Teletype paper with black print on yellowish paper, and then punch cards and 11x13 fanfold paper with the white and green alternating stripes.
Later I spent many years using "glass teletypes" and the IBM Monochrome Display, both with green-on-nothing. I guess you would call that a dark mode.
When I started using Windows in the mid-1980s, I adapted to "light mode", but I had to turn the background down to a medium gray because even on a high end CRT display of the day, the flicker was so awful and it was less noticeable with a subdued background.
Then high-quality LCD displays came along and the flicker went away. Around the same time, my eyes were changing. I developed astigmatism, and even with good single vision prescription lenses (a must!) I found that text was much easier to read in a light mode. Perhaps for the same reason that I now have more trouble driving at night than I used to.
There is one bit of science to this: the light background causes your eyes' irises to stop down, and just as with a camera lens, this can result in a sharper image than a wide open aperture.
But again, my eyes are not your eyes, and I'm not disputing your preference for a dark mode.
I will say that one key to using a light mode successfully is to turn the brightness down. And maybe turn your room lighting up a bit. Someone else in the thread mentioned this, but a white background on your screen should be about the same brightness as a white sheet of paper in the same lighting conditions.
Most/all of the points were well known back in the days when I used CRT monitors - he's not reporting something new. In fact, reading some of the comments, I'm quite surprised people still believe there are inherent benefits to dark mode. There's not really much research supporting it.
It's just a preference thing. I myself prefer it as I grew up on terminals where dark was the default (and often, the only option). For those who prefer the opposite: Totally OK.
That's actually kind of ridiculous.
I don't need to read other's research about dark mode to know how it lessens eye-strain. I have performed the experiment myself with my own eyes.
It is ridiculous for people with eyes to not use their own eyes except to read studies as to whether their own eyes prefer light or dark. That should be obvious.
It is clearly anecdotal [1] at the very least to everyone else that reads your comment. It is also clearly insufficient to draw any scientifically valid conclusions.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anecdotal%20evide...
You are simply repeating something enough that you believe it to be true. You are misinformed about the meaning of the word anecdotal [1] and appear to be playing word games between "anecdotal", "anecdotal evidence", and a misunderstanding of what I wrote.
> It is also clearly insufficient to draw any scientifically valid conclusions.
What is the "it" in your comment? An experiment that someone performs is not anecdotal. [2]
Do you see a difference?
What part of "It's just a preference thing" are you disputing?
That wasn't part of my comment, which I why I didn't quote that.
> I'm quite surprised people still believe there are inherent benefits to dark mode. There's not really much research supporting it.
You were not saying "it's just a preference thing" there.
That's exactly what anecdotal means: one person's account of something.
What did you think it meant?
You've probably got your brightness too high if you're getting after images.
I use darkmode when I'm inside and turn my monitor brightness down. When I'm outside, I switch to lightmode and max out my monitor display. Work for me.
I suspect this is an extremely difficult question to answer until we have a perfect model of humans. Maybe there is some gene/mutation that affects something to do with brightness/darkness. Maybe there is some adaptation that happens after staring at at dark/light mode.
Unfortunately we are extremely far from having good models of the human body :(.
Also, for programming I’m using not dark nor bright mode. Something like #ddd on #444 on well-calibrated settings. Almost all sites which implement dark mode are much closer to #neutron_star on #black_hole than that, so I hate them when they fail to follow an OS setting.
* reduce monitor brightness
* increase contrast between background and text
For me, light grey background (no blaring, eye smashing white) with black text works well. The only point of "grey not white" is again, to reduce a smashed-in-the-face white background.
If one keeps the contrast difference low, that is, slightly-lighter dark text on dark background, then the monitor must be brighter to discern difference between text and background.
(Of course, as you have stated, this may not work for you.)
And, you didn't see that here. That you would even think that shows that you didn't read what was written.
It is ridiculous to wait for what others say about whether dark or light mode strains one's eyes more, since each person already has a pair of eyes to test what works for them.
Not at all. I know people who tried homeopathic medicine and felt better afterwards, and swear by it. It is very much analogous.
The linked article is about objective measures of eye strain and health. Unless someone explicitly says otherwise, it's very reasonable to assume that they're also discussing those objective measures instead of subjective perception. If not - they're completely off-topic and they shouldn't be commenting here.
In particular, the comment earlier in this thread "I don't need to read other's research about dark mode to know how it lessens eye-strain. I have performed the experiment myself with my own eyes." doesn't say "my subjective perception of eye-strain", so we can assume that they're referring to the objective measurements, as is the actual topic for the thread.
The problem with "works for me" is not that that argument is invalid in and of itself. The problem is that homeopaths don't actually know that it works for them. What healed your infection and what did and didn't help is almost impossible to know.
Dark mode is very different. "do I have eyestrain after 4 hours of work" is easy to answer, and dark mode can be toggled with a single click to see how it affects you.
It shows just how people who see themselves as smart and scientific leaning can still fall to the same fallacies as any fool.
We all literally did. You said, quoted:
> I don't need to read other's research about dark mode to know how it lessens eye-strain. I have performed the experiment myself with my own eyes.
That is exactly the same as "I know this is true and I don't need researchers telling me otherwise".
> It is ridiculous to wait for what others say about whether dark or light mode strains one's eyes more, since each person already has a pair of eyes to test what works for them.
That's not how having eyes works - you are physically incapable of measuring eye strain yourself without external equipment and rigorous scientific process. Your subjective perception of reality is not objective reality itself, and your perceived comfort level is not consistent with the actual strain being put on your body, full stop.
Your logic of "each person already has a pair of eyes to test what works for them" directly implies that things that feel good are good for you, which is objectively not how the body works.
You're completely and categorically wrong here.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you're one anecdata point without study.
Yes, UV and top end blue does cause cataracts in people, but thats from the sun, not monitors.
There are at least two strands to darkmode, one is the "It stops me from sleeping" and the other is eye strain.
the sleeping part is almost certainly nothing to do with the colour temperature of the light coming out of your device. If you go outside at dusk, you will note that its overwhelmingly blue in most places, most of the year (in london its orange for an hour in april and october.) yes, sunset tends to be orange, but the long bit after (again depending on longitude) is overwhelmingly blue.
The moon casts blue light.
You can't get to sleep because you've been hooked on twitter/instagram/ticktok and are revved up because that's what they do. "YOU NEED TO DO THIS NOW" or "THE SITUATION IS REALLY BAD, BECAUSE YOU DIDNT X" and "OMG THEY ARE SO HOT" finally "YOU ARE FAILING BECAUSE YOU DIDNT DO THIS ONE OLD WEIRD TRICK"
You have tension headaches because you've been frowning at a screen for many hours. Or you've not blinked, looked up moved your eyes, or generally changed position.
Now, there are some people for whom this doesn't apply, and that blue light is the cause of their woes. But for 99.5% of you, it won't be.
The evolutionary mechanism for selecting blue-sensitive rod cells in our retinas along with red-sensitive cone cells must surely be unrelated to the sodium emission spectrum, given that so may other mammals have similar retinas but lack fire-making skills.
But it might also be just a quirk of evolution, or have a completely different reason.
"That’s why military grade night vision goggles always use a green light. You get a much clearer sight picture with extra contrast while preserving most of the night vision once the light gets shut off."
The trend these days is towards white phosphor in NVDs. This is because, while green is indeed better if you have to look at it and away repeatedly in low light, white is significantly better at producing high-contrast images. And you do want high contrast to be able to spot things when it's dark.
Moonlight is not blue. In fact it is more red than sunlight.
The color of moonlight, particularly around full moon, appears bluish to the human eye compared to other, brighter light sources due to the Purkinje effect. The blue or silver appearance of the light is an illusion.
There’s no doubt that the stimulation from something like TikTok as opposed to reading a Gutenberg ebook has more to do with the content than the light emitting from your phone. The notion, however, that the light of the phone (or other screen) has nothing to do with mental stimulation is utter nonsense. Brighter light is more stimulating. Period. The details of blue light versus dark mode are completely secondary to the primary concern of a bright white screen with black text opposed to the opposite.
So far, there is no observable difference. Now, I'm not going to claim that this is therefore obviously the case for everybody else. But, at the very least, it's not universally a "godsend".
My experience has been widely anecdotally backed up in casual conversation in my life (including by a sleep specialist). The blue light stuff is a marketing ploy in my opinion. I’m mentioning blue light repeatedly because you highlighting this makes it seem like I failed to communicate my point. Dark mode, however, is universally a godsend (see “anecdotal evidence” acknowledgement).
Perhaps you’re not a reader? As an insomniac, the only excuse for not reading to fall asleep is ADHD or other focus problems. It’s too ideal a solution for insomnia not to be acknowledged in this context. Please forgive my inflammatory tone, but I tend to doubt you having severe insomnia (coupled with routine in-patient/out-patient sleep studies, medication, etc.) and not being able to follow the flow of my communication here. Having a hard time falling asleep and being diagnosed with severe insomnia are very different.
There is a tiny demographic of people with actual joint issues, but for anyone else a regular knife is just fine as long as you use the correct grip.
[0] https://www.arthritissupplies.com/assets/images/ape103-easi-...
I've never been worried about blue light. I sleep fine. And stayed away from social media because it seemed unhealthy to me from the start, so I've never been hooked on twitter/instagram/tiktok. I actually feel for the people who are obsessed with it, especially the number of journalists who seem to have defined their jobs and role in life around reporting what was said by whom on twitter. There seems to be a small trend forming around people exiting that particular sink hole and realizing immediate improvements in their life experience. I hope that situation continues to improve, but that's up to each person to decide whether social media is helpful or harmful for their life and goals.
While I do spend a lot of time in front of a screen, I also get up regularly, stretch, walk around, take the dog out for a walk, etc. So I don't get tension headaches. If I feel uncomfortable at all, I do something about it.
Your reply here makes a lot of assumptions about what you know about other people, their situations, what you know about this area of study, and what the solutions are. This is the actual issue that seems to make this light v dark mode discussion more difficult that it needs to be.
What has been properly studied in this area is pretty thin as most areas of scientific inquiry go. So there really isn't much anyone can claim to know here with the levels of certainty you seem to express.
Aside from that, you're being pretty aggressive about giving out unasked advice to people you don't know, whose situations you don't know.
If you can't understand why someone like myself can read and understand everything you just said and none the less enjoy dark mode; if it bothers you that people claim dark mode benefits them in spite of your certainty that they are mistaken and this is just a matter of having the right information, then you might try accepting that people are different, start asking more questions, and dial down the unasked advice. You might happier and more pleasant company for it.
Not everyone needs to be the same for you to be okay with the situation. You don't need to fix people. If anything you just need to understand more.
Dry eye based eye strain & tension headaches have good literature to back them up. Its not unknown.
> Aside from that, you're being pretty aggressive about giving out unasked advice
its not advice.
> none the less enjoy dark mode
There is nothing wrong with darkmode, it just has no real medical effect. I have dark mode, and sometimes when I feel like it, high contrast.
You are confusing Ockham's razor with a personal attack.
It's been interesting because my wife is complaining about feeling glum but I've been in a much better mood than I've been in the last few winters. We're talking about spending a few thousand dollars to get ultra bright lighting throughout the house instead of just in my office.
400-450 nits I've found is about the minimum for universally usable display brightness indoors, assuming either a matte finish or good anti-glare coating (e.g. like that on newer MacBooks). If it's the sadly far more common mirror-type glossy displays found on damn near every laptop and non-enthusiast/pro desktop monitor out there, you're going to need 500-600 nits to cut through the glare.
And the widescreen format is great for development.
The 34" is basically an extended 27", whereas the 38" is an extended 32"
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/alienware-34-curved-qd-oled-...
That's my biggest issue
Maybe an aside, but for notebooks, I know that notebookcheck always has a section about this in their reviews. https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Dragonfly-Folio-13-5-G3-con... for example - and even if PWM is detected, they check how high the frequency is (high enough and it should bother no one). For monitors, RTINGs.com checks for PWM, https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/dell/alienware-aw3423... as an example (like imhoguy mentioned, flicker free is the keyword to search for).
I don’t mind working in a dark room, but if I do it for weeks at a time I’ll start to have problems if I’m not getting bright lights at other times (which during winter there aren’t many opportunities for).
It also has the hilarious added effect of totally blowing out my laptops webcam and making me look like I have an angelic halo of light atop my head.
A behaviour I've observed in myself is I gravitate towards big windows and like to work in an environment where I feel I have lots of space, but I am very happy working in complete darkness (but also value sunlight)
What I can't tolerate is "half-light" - dimly lit space, afternoon/evening levels of daylight. Or the standard level of light most people have. Or warm light. That's one is actually a point of contention with my wife - she prefers warm light, I prefer cold. We compromised on "neutral", which has a benefit of not screwing with colors like warm does. It's tolerable for me, though I still occasionally notice how it yellow-tints everything.
By can't tolerate, I mean that in underlit rooms, I struggle to stay awake. Really struggle - I start to yawn uncontrollably, my mind gets hazy, and I need to pump myself with some stimulants (i.e. caffeine, usually) just to be able to function. Add more lights, or make the room dark, and I'm OK again.
Make sure to get a high-CRI led, that’s what really makes the difference in my opinion. Cheap leds will have a narrow frequency band, high CRI is what makes the reflected light feel more real.
I use a cpu heatsink with silent fan to keep the led cool.
[0] https://aliexpress.com/item/4000393264115.html (48W warm white)
We’ve got 16A circuits at 220V here, so you could do about 70 of those before tripping a breaker :D
You're talking about something very different than the original poster then. They mentioned something more in the 400 watt range. I have around 70 watts of LEDs (split between 7 bulbs) in my small office (7 square meters), and am considering boosting that significantly.
50 watts I would put in the range of "normal bright lighting" (it's approximately the equivalent of one halogen floor lamp). 400 watts gets into "trying to simulate sunlight for therapeutic reasons"-territory.
Like you, I found a huge improvement in mood if I use light cues to help convince my body that I live in an eternal late spring. So far I've used Hue bulbs, as I love their color temperature range and the ease of programming. (For me it helps that a plausible day-night cycle just happens in my house.) But I've wondered if daylight-like lumens would be even better. And Hue is cost-prohibitive for that level of light.
I just went to Home Depot and bought the 8-packs of 100W (13W) equivalent, 5000K, 1600 lumen non dimmable LED bulbs from Feit Electric. Screwed those into a 4-Way light ceiling fan using 4 7-way splitters.
I bought a big 10,000 lumen, 100W corn bulb (with no fan) at a Menards, and screwed that into an old floor lamp I had sitting around. This was actually my first try before I did the wider array of lights, but it wasn’t bright enough by itself. The light from this is also “dirtier” and depending on your webcam it might show lines as it’ll refresh at 60hz or 120hz or something like that, and make your Zoom calls look like you live in a CRT.
I know a lot of people talk about high CRI bulbs when you get into the weeds in this sort of stuff, but I didn’t want to make perfect the enemy of good here.
If you spent a little more you could buy dimmable bulbs instead, although it’d probably be easier depending on your hookup to just selectively shut off some of the bulbs to accomplish the same goal.
More holistically, for day night cycling, I’ve also started taking 0.3mg of melatonin (don’t take more than this, your body doesn’t need it, google it if you’re interested). I’ve found it helps me get to bed earlier and stay asleep until morning, where I’d wake up sometimes.
Sure, it probably triples their power bill. But electricity is dirt cheap anyway - and if it mitigates their SAD, then it pays for itself.
I'm also guessing OP doesn't have any problem with heating in winter.
EDIT: I misread, OP isn't using 100/500W bulbs, but 100/500W equivalent - so the actual power use is not ~3KW, but probably under 1KW. It's very much in ballpark of combined use of household appliances, so I doubt it even doubles their power bill.
As for day-night cycling, I basically achieve the same thing through lighting, and I'm very happy with that. As my lights get warmer and dimmer in the evening, I very naturally start winding down. To get that with Hue's own automations requires me putting in something like 8 steps, though, so I'll soon be going back to my own software. Especially because I use my lights to change my time zone before trips to the east coast, so I'm not jet lagged when I arrive.
For video calls in particular I have an Elgato Key Light clamped to my desk at maximum extension and facing almost straight down. It gets me good brightness and controllable color temperature as well as pretty even lighting, which makes my calls look pretty good.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-light-therap...
YMMV, but something I discovered is that light colors bother me when they're out of sync with my day-night rhythms. So mine start very warm in color, very gradually shift to pretty cool color temperatures as we approach noon, and then get warmer again into the evening.
My theory is that this gets me what the SAD lights are simulating without any manual effort, and it seems to be working. It also helps me with maintaining a regular sleep schedule in that it turns out I'm not a responsible light-switch user; it's easy for me to leave lights on and be active so late that I then have trouble getting up on time.
If/when I ever have reason to redo all of the lights in my house, I'll definitely go with all bulbs that support at least different color temperatures if not a full range of colors and give this a whirl.
My theory is that this gets me what the SAD lights are simulating without any manual effort, and it seems to be working
Very interesting...
It also took me ages to realize how large of an effect SAD had on me. I grew up in Texas, where it wasn't much of a thing, but went to college in Michigan and then moved to Germany (where I've been for 20 years) and it took me multiple years to notice the pattern of only struggling with what I'd previously dubbed "burn out" in the winter. That I used to visit Texas every Christmas masked the effect for a while since it gave me something of a reset during the shortest days of the year.
Now I manage with a combination of what I'd thought of as redonkulous amounts of lighting (20-ish bulbs in my living room, 7 in my small office), and usually 1+ months away from Berlin in the winter.
It's only been relatively recent that going to your extent in terms of lumens has been possible. I was previously pushing 1000w of halogen lighting in my living room, and going to a multiple of that felt like it got into extremely wasteful territory. (There is the reasonable counterargument that in winter, all of the lighting watts also heat the apartment, but I use my lighting setup for a lot of months where I don't also need heating...)
Do you also go for high-CRI bulbs? That's been a limiting factor for me at times is that I don't like the spectrum of cheaper LEDs (or CFLs) and often sourcing high-watt, high-CRI bulbs can be tricky. (I was late in switching to LEDs in general, having previously stockpiled halogen bulbs before they were banned in Europe, but a HN comment a couple years ago turned me on to high-CRI bulbs, which was a game-changer for me.)
- Did you experiment with any of the super high powered single LEDs? (e.g. 200-500w)
- How big a problem is monitor glare? Do you have a special monitor (e.g. Studio Display)? I have a 400 nit monitor (brightest 42" IPS monitor at the time I bought it), and I'm worried about going all in on lighting, and then not being able to effectively being able to use my monitor.
I’m using ~400-450 nits brightness monitors and it’s fine in light mode. I can make things out in dark mode but it’s less pleasant.
I don’t get monitor glare but maybe that’s due to positioning? I have the corn bulb up and to the left of me and the 28 bulbs are stuck into the ceiling fan (which looks silly but works!)
I'm too pedantic / OCD-ish to deal with the colors being so off. If you're the sort of person that's bugged by that sort of thing, just bite the bullet and get the better bulbs. If you've still got old indansecents around, try them out in that fixture. If you feel like it restores sanity, then high CRI LEDs will too.
I wish I could say, "They'll last you 10 years", but my experience with LEDs has been that I feel like they literally die as often as my old incandescents, but because I use so many lights in my home, I'm happy for the power savings.
I find high CRI bulbs hard enough to shop for that I've half-debated starting an online shop for them specifically.
This specific acronym is IMO a bit too appropriate for the subject.
One possible detriment to this idea is probably now staring at a bright monitor for 8 hours a day.
Considering that outside is also somewhat bright normally, it shouldn't be that significant of a problem, but then again, I've noticed that I blink less frequently when using a computer.
There's also an emerging market of RLCD (reflective LCD) monitors which don't use internal backlight but instead rely on external light. If the monitor receives enough light the image is pretty sharp (they _need_ external light to be usable).
They are mostly available in bigger sizes but their resolution isn't great yet (I haven't seen higher than 1080p). But it seems that due to different technologies used, the text should be quite smooth and not that pixelated.
Also, whether you're using dark or light mode, contrast and brightness need to be set right, and I think they have different requirements for contrast and brightness; in dark mode, I suspect the fewer bright parts need to be brighter than the large light background in bright mode. So if you're comfortable using your current mode, simply switching to the other one without adjusting your contrast and brightness might indeed give you a worse experience, no matter which mode it is.
Or maybe not. I seem to be fine mixing different modes. I used to always have my IDE in bright mode, but it's currently in dark mode, and it's fine, and HN uses bright mode, and that's fine too. But I did notice that when it's dark, I do prefer dark mode.
On other side some dark themes have pretty terrible contrast, but that happens with white too, like HN just deciding light gray on light gray is fine just because someone downvoted a comment
Hell, even the header with buttons have [1] terrible contrast
* [1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=939392&...
Unfortunately with their recent redesign, the new default dark theme has joined the rest of the crowd with being way too dark, but thankfully darcula is still an option in settings.
Before the dark mode fad took off, people used to just do UI design and make interfaces that were just that - interfaces. They weren't attempting to be obsessively light or dark, so we got a wide variety of things in app UIs and the UIs didn't shy away from borderlines, shadows, color, darker elements in an otherwise not very dark UI, etc.
Then dark mode happened, and everyone wanted to design dark mode things. Dark mode makes small contrasts more legible (IME) and makes colors really, really pop. So you can easily design very flat UIs without anything in the way of borders, and small bits of color are really dramatic and eye catching.
Not-dark colorscapes feel really different - small contrast differences aren't as salient, you can use dark elements in the UI without disrupting it much. Borderlines and drop shadows look great, really high contrast for text just feels nice. Color is a much more balanced part of the whole, so you can use it much more liberally and it'll just feel nice and balanced.
But those are not the UIs we get today. Humans love to categorize things, and they like pairs of opposites a lot. If we have a specific dark theme, well, what do we call the other one? Light theme, of course. And in a disastrous display of nominative determinism, that's exactly what we've gotten afterwards: Designers have intentionally started making UIs that are actively light, and those are not designed specifically - most are just slapping white paint on the existing flat dark theme, or otherwise obey those same design sensibilities with light grays on white and minimal use of color.
Why would anyone want to use light themes if they constantly get designed wrong? The proper contrast people should be working with isn't light and dark theme or white and black theme, but colorful and intentionally dark.
A dark mode could make it bearable to work in poor light conditions but won't improve on the fact that it's already a non-optimal environment.
Mind you, I do the same when watching TV. Some shows and movies these days are so dark you simply have to turn off the lights and close the curtains to see what's going on.
In regards to eye strain with light mode, what I found important is to match screen brightness to „environmental brightness“ (don’t know the proper term).
As a rule of thumb, when I put a white paper in front of a white screen, the screen shouldn’t illuminate the paper more than the other lights in the room.
"Ambient" brightness. You were close, and that term worked well enough!
Oh yes, exactly this. At evening when sun is going down, then I can feel eye strain as I am looking into brighter and brighter monitor. Switching the light on will easily resolve it.
I used to use dark mode every where because it was somewhat accepted that the lesser bright the better.
But then I read a science-based post years ago about why light mode is better for our eyes, especially for people with astigmatism, as our eyes are naturally used to focus on objects on bright scenarios (sunlight).
Switched back to light theme right away, except for coding, because actually syntax highlighting is better with dark background.
Proposes that black on white text stimulates a pattern of expression in visual system that may contribute to myopia:
> Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) in young human subjects, we found that the choroid, the heavily perfused layer behind the retina in the eye, becomes about 16 µm thinner in only one hour when subjects read black text on white background but about 10 µm thicker when they read white text from black background. Studies both in animal models and in humans have shown that thinner choroids are associated with myopia development and thicker choroids with myopia inhibition. Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.
You said WoB contributes to myopia.
Your own source says WoB inhibits myopia.
https://stitcher.io/blog/why-light-themes-are-better-accordi...
https://medium.com/codesphere-cloud/should-you-really-be-cod...
I don't have conclusive proof, of course, but in my experience it is those symptoms that get exacerbated.
I’m nearsighted, maybe that’s a differentiator? Although I‘m not sure if astigmatism always comes with nearsightednesd or not.
When switching to glasses it's actually bit better.
So what they tend to do is to have the low end of the brightness range way too high and often even use tricks like simply displaying a darker image (Rather than a darker backlight) which reduces color depth and accuracy even more.
I use my otherwise excellent LG 24UD58 with brightness at 0% during the day! So during the night it's way too bright.
You can accomplish this also by setting the contrast to a low value on screens where the brightness simply doesn't go that low. But some screens just incorporate this trick in the brightness control themselves. Also you can use software options of which dark mode is one. However all these methods (with the exception of dark mode!) result in screwed up color depth (and thus excessive banding also) and dynamic range.
I grew up with white on black displays but these days I prefer black on white because it's easier to read with eyes that have astigmatism. But I end up using dark mode at night anyway because otherwise my display brightness just isn't bearable.
What doesn't help is that I live in a hot country with no AC and during summer I usually live with the windows open at night and the lights off to avoid attracting bugs. So it's difficult. I really wish display builders would optimize for low brightness more.
You can get a proper full range of brightness by using a radiology reading monitor. It's going to run you well into the four figures, though.
If you want better contrast a VA panel does better, but they have color shift from different viewing angles.
Or if you have a lot of money, OLED is probably the best bet for this. But those are pretty new on the market and still expensive.
It's not difficult. Any problem is designer laziness. Only real problem is if white light source used have some nonlinearity with white balance, but having accurate current control isn't all that hard, just gotta use actual current control instead of just PWMing CC source with no filtering whatsoever.
The problem is exactly what you mentioned after
> Nobody looks at the minimum spec if it's even provided.
nobody tests for that so consumer can't even find the good ones easily.
As in my case. OFC brand new displays could use even less.
Also color temperature 'warm', something like 5000k, or even below.
If you can't setup them that way, they are broken by design and/or you're using them wrong.
Besides, even at high noon on a clear day I don't push them over 55%, when the sun shines in brightly from the side. Same during sunrise, or until sunset.
for instance (on windows at least) the program "OBS" uses a dark theme; in a recent version, when you open up any settings window, the window is drawn for a few milliseconds as a bright white square, before the dark window 'renders' [0]. this sudden strobe of white light, without warning, is worse than if the interface was just bright all the time (imo)
this flashing light issue has also plagued chromium off and on for over 10 years. [1]
[0] https://i.imgur.com/P9rM5A3.gif
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21798
The contrast between pure white backgrounds and pure black text is too stark and causes greater eyestrain when it's directly transmitted light as opposed to reflected light. Displays in light mode that are reflective do not have this kind of strain because their background is more silvery.
Turning down the brightness on a display is not really the solution because most displays use pulse width modulation so you are just exchanging brightness for flicker and strobing effects.
I pose you this question, when it comes to paper, do you enjoy reading books that are printed on pure white paper which has had optical brighteners added to enhance the effect, or do you prefer a softer natural ivory or linen colour? Perhaps light gray? If so, then why should your screen be pure white?
This is what it boils down to for most people. Using a less-than-pure white or a cream colour like HN makes for a much more pleasant read. At night it's often still too bright for me, but I'm happy to switch modes according to how I feel at the time.
Basically, make light mode pleasant by using f.lux. Then there are no unpleasant transitions whenever something doesn't play along with dark mode.
Gotta add this to my list of ways the market fails us that I wish I know how to correct. I get that PWM is an useful, probably most cost-efficient approach, but that doesn't explain so many shitty implementations I see even in expensive devices. In case of lights, it's harmful to a subset of people who notice this. It also ruins video recordings (less so these days - camera software now tries to compensates for it).
Then I see the same in electric and induction stoves, and microwave ovens - power level control implemented as sub-1Hz PWM (at this point the right term is probably "bang-bang controller"). I don't know about designers of those appliances, but my cookware and the stuff I cook often doesn't have enough thermal mass to "smooth out" the pulses - 50% of power implemented by heating at 100% for 3 seconds, and then 0% for 3 seconds, means my food gets overheated anyway, just half as fast, and I get to be annoyed by the sound of a clicking relay.
Thanks for mentioning this. I've never understood why people preferred dark-mode over reducing brightness of their screen. Perhaps, they are disturbed by flickering on a subtler level that they are not consciously aware of.
My eyes feel better on both short term and long term use. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable on my eyes.
Whether or not it is technically more readable or not doesn't matter to me. I don't need a study of a population to know what feels better to me. I'm a sample size of one, but the only one in this case that matters. Others are free to make their own choice. YMMV.
Mine and your subjective experience of feeling pain/discomfort from lighter screens can never be disproven by science, so a sample size of 1 is all that is needed.
As soon as I left the comfortable worlds of Apple ][ and MS-DOS and got shoved into Windows 3.0, I pined for a dark screen and started fucking with the color profile. When I was 12.
When I started running Solaris and Linux boxes in college, always had a dark terminal, and wrote my code in vi.
The older I get, the more I crave the darkness, and the UX bros are accommodating me.
Maybe it's just too late for me already.
Windows 3, Word for Windows and TSE were a godsend to me. Finally, I could read and write code and documents the way I thought they were intended to be viewed- dark text on a light background, mimicking real-world books and papers.
Today, I do use dark mode; my devices are set up to go dark late at night, in case I wake up and want to check something without burning my eyes. But that comprises a miniscule amount of the time I spend in front of a screen.
Real-world paper doesn't have a backlight behind it, projecting bright white light directly into your eyes. If you want to see documents the way they were "intended" to be viewed, you need to use an e-ink screen.
Its not clear at all that blue light has a significant impact on sleep or eyestrain; the science is ambigious.
The main piece of research referenced suggests that dark mode is worse in situations of low ambient light. But that was at small text sizes; of course, light text on a dark background has less contrast than dark text on a light background. That doesn't address the question of whether dark mode, used correctly, helps to alleviate eyestrain in low ambient light conditions. The suggestions offered seem to have little empirical evidence to back them up. If you feel more comfortable using dark mode at night there is little here to suggest that it would be harmful.
But thankfully Linux happened. I'm running my xterms with "reverse video" (aka a dark theme) on since Debian 1.1 or so (not Debian 11 but Debian 1.1). The parameter to xterm for "reverse video" is called "-rv".
Emacs: dark theme since forever. Fun fact IntelliJ used to ship without a dark theme but everything was configurable, so I created my own dark theme for early IntelliJ (the only issue was broken font anti-aliasing on a dark background: solved by using a pixel perfect font).
Nowadays? Dark themes everywhere of course and this blog post won't convince me to change.
The reason why so many people seem to switch to it is because they literally live in goblin caves without proper lighting. Working in a well lit room and not at night and a properly configured monitor is a much better solution than dark mode.
There's a scenarion when this is incorrect: when the light foreground is the only source of light.
I use black backgrounds with white text for reading on OLED because the only light entering my eyes is the information I need. You can tell me all you want that it doesn't reduce eye strain, it does. I can tell because I can feel my eyes.
This is the key: Do you work on a very illuminated place? Use light mode. Do you work in somewhat darkness? Please use dark mode.
At least that's what I try to follow, otherwise at the end of the day my eyes gets very tired.
Ambient lighting ~= screen brightness, whether light or dark
Dark ambience = dilated pupil = 0.5 diopter decrease in lens focus
Tear film over eyes helps focus: blink, yawn, monitor dehydration & humidity
Best light: unfiltered daylight, e.g. window behind computer screen
Artificial: high CRI LED, low flicker, low blue (e.g. 2700K Sylvane Truwave)
For closeup glasses, fixed lens focal length at lens-screen distance
20-20-20: look out window, or 20+ foot distant object for 20s every 20m
Daily exposure to natural light, with distance focusing for eye musclesI thought I thanked you and moved on, but it seems I've pissed you off. Sorry, guess the curt and literal HackerNewsSpeak is rubbing off on me.
Dedicated computer glasses for screen distance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560500
2018 discussion of computers and eye health, including one point forgotten above—move the screen as far away as practical, to reduce eye stress from extended periods of closeup focus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16146106
Yawning/tears for eye lubrication, https://iristech.co/yawning/
Ambient light, pupil dilation and focus, https://endmyopia.org/why-vision-is-worse-at-night-and-on-cl... (this user-contributed article stands alone, the rest of the site is not endorsed by mainstream optometry)
Something could be said for appropriate lighting, but in the reality is your don't got to choose that all the time, and sometimes you just want to maintain the lighting situation because of another activity (maybe a baby is asleep in the same room, or you or someone else is watching a movie).
There's nothing more jarring than lighting up a dark room with your phone because you opened up something that decides to predominately use white for some reason, besides the fact it definitely uses more power on an amoled display, which most displays are hopefully moving towards.
I'm sure light mode appreciators are always on top of changing their display brightness, but I'm still curious how they deal with amoled displays.
What works for the average is likely a good starting point. It is not necessarily the best for you and a given case (almost for sure different from the experimental ones).
I noticed I was getting extreme eye strain because I kept alt tabbing from apps that supported dark mode to apps that didn't. That constant change from light to dark screens was far more straining to my eyes than my screen being consistently bright.
I quite like the sepia night mode settings though. I don't find it helps with sleep as some claim, but it does seem to make the screen slightly easier to look at for longer periods.
I didn’t read the study itself, but usually the scientists (if they aren’t pushing an agenda) are aware of the limitations of their studies. It’s the people reporting and commenting on those studies that extrapolate unwarranted conclusions and generalizations from them.
Incidentally, for most people, this means that - unless they're spending most of their time outdoors - they're not getting enough light.
I actually had to learn advanced config editor in Firefox to stop websites from forcing dark mode without alternative.
I'm curious, how many of my fellow dark-mode users also struggle with migraine headaches? Perhaps this and other light-sensitivity afflictions can explain why dark mode seems to be so contentious...
I think it's therefore important that the actual benefits of dark mode are tested scientifically and not just assumed.
Theoretically it would be probably be optimal in terms of the science of visual perception to flood my room with the brightest white light possible, instead of using my usual dimmed yellow lights. It would also make me feel subjectively terrible (like my eyes were bleeding) so I don’t do it, and I don’t need a study to back it up.
Well, no.
If people think something is helping their eyesight, but it's really making it worse, that's a problem.
A lot of dev and gamer oriented sites/apps have a dark mode because it's trendy.
Whether it is objectively better is something I'm very interested in, especially as there are some things (e.g. Twitch's theatre mode) that only offer a dark mode.
I understand that in certain lights white themes are probably easier, but I just have myself setup to only need dark themes now because migraines suck
Dark chrome helps light content pop, reduces distractions. Unfortunately, the moment one turns it (dark chrome) on, the content goes dark too.
Depending on your eyesight, you might be OK. I for one can't look at dark content in light ambient conditions for longer than few minutes without discomfort.
This might be an artifact of your screen's limited contrast. Have you tried dark mode on an OLED screen?
"Chrome" here refers to windows and widgets surrounding content, not the browser specifically.
- Base background: white or slightly off white -> a dark enough grey or off-grey for good baseline contrast
- Borders: darker on the grey scale -> dark enough to strongly contrast the base background, or omitted for bordered areas which are already that dark
- Toolbars, window handles, other concrete “chrome” areas: darker than baseline, for both light and dark modes
- Buttons and text: high contrast, dark in light mode, light in dark mode
- Active items: accent color or outline for maximum contrast
- Colors generally: the same hues except when other color perception preferences are chosen (for either mode), but generally a slightly lower saturation for dark mode backgrounds, and hue adjustments for color perception errors in color spaces
All of this in my experience needs a lot of eyeballing but quite a lot could probably be approximated with good perceptual light and color models. But I’ll still prefer light mode most of the time.
Of browsers: Firefox defaults to having content matching the browser theme, but does let you change it: Settings → General → Language and Appearance → Web site appearance: Automatic/Light/Dark. (In the distant past, this defaulted to matching the OS theme—which almost always meant “light” on Linux and Windows—and could only be changed via about:config. In Firefox 95, the default was changed to matching the browser theme, in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1529323. In Firefox 100, the preference was finally added to Settings.)
—⁂—
¹ There are several distinct categories of dark modes, with significantly different characteristics. I recognise four general categories (though there are certainly intermediate states too): æsthetic, accessibility, low-light, and power-saving. I wrote a bit more about each in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28516862. These days, æsthetic is the most common.
https://lunar.fyi/?source=lowtechguys
Unrelated to dark mode, but is a visual game changer.
People should also take the time out to get appropriate light bulbs for their studies and work desks.
I want to speak more on visual settings in web design and GUIs, but I’m eating some corn chips. In brief, I’m starting to understand that accessibility concerns don’t refer exclusively to people with certain conditions, but even those who want to use computers comfortably.
What are these?
For example, for some deranged reason I felt that it was appropriate to have my entire study engulfed in Daylight lightbulbs. The three bulbs in the ceiling fan and the tall lamp next to my desk. Daylight. I must have figured, “Man, I do a lot of reading”, or something like that. Daylight.
This went on for quite sometime. I would often receive comments about how the lamp would serve better for interrogations, but I kept on with this setup until I got a monitor for my laptop. This required a non-impeding alteration to the layout of my desk. The height and bend of the lamp had to be changed, I had to change how I sat to accommodate how I looked at the monitor, or when I was using both the laptop and monitor. Stuff like that.
It wasn’t until my right eye began to feel dry that I decided to make a change. So I spent some time learning how to choose the right lightbulb. I did not need daylight. I was not in a restroom or operating a security camera. I needed something warmer. So I got something warmer and I use Lunar.
This is a strange argument for dark/light mode. It might be easier to see, but can you imagine how tired your eyes would get if you were looking for/at dark blobs on a hilltop all day? I wouldn't last an hour.
I'm fine with this guy preferring light mode. I've tried them both for many years each and I much prefer dark mode for my own well being.
All this would be resolved if we had proper lighting, as is mandated in every Swedish office in fact.
But I like working late from home, so I have very poor lighting a lot of times. Therefore bright applications and websites hurt my eyes more than darker ones.
Dark-colored text over a light background will result in a higher contrast ratio than the opposite combination.
Design decisions must be objective and based on data.
As an option, the user must have the choice to apply different modes and themes based on A11 for low vision.
For example, the principle of higher contrast (dark-colored text on light background) will be literally painful for people with photophobia.
More on this subject: https://www.w3.org/TR/low-vision-needs/#light-sensitivity
The fad aspect should not be overlooked. Originally, "light mode" GUIs on CRTs was something of a fools errand because most CRTs are somewhat non-linear so light mode emphasized waviness and interference patterns and outright astigmatism. Occasionally "light mode" was a bragging point that your hardware could handle it and your GUI was designed to cooperate with the limited hardware of the day (think original 80s 90s apples). Around the turn of the century "light mode" became a financial status symbol that you can afford a "perfect" LCD display, so only the coolest people used light mode. Now, 2010 is too old to be stylish so obviously the opposite of light mode is "dark mode" and that is the pinnacle of style because it proves you're using something designed or redesigned post 2015 or so. Just the usual conspicuous consumption oneupsmanship.
Another aspect rarely mentioned is distraction / ADD / working conditions. Obviously dark mode on a glossy screen provides something of a perfect mirror to see your surroundings which is usually distracting to normal people in normal conditions. For those with ADD or easily distracted in a tightly packed open office its practically an ADA issue to force them to use dark mode. If I must have a glossy screen I find it vastly less distracting to use light mode. Turn up the brightness so its not the brightest thing in the room but its brighter than the endlessly moving reflections on the screen and light mode looks pretty good.
¹: which ever since having my natural lenses replaced by synthetic ones appear violet to me instead of the bluish-white before
Each should use what they like, and eyes (and the brains that they depend on) are pretty unique. Therefore, I would not expect any two people to look at the same thing and agree completely on what they see - or how they feel about it.
I do wish the dark mode proponents would accept that recording video or presenting in dark mode is usually a bad idea for two primary reasons.
1. Viewers may be in environments with high ambient light. Dark mode, viewed in a very bright environment, can be difficult or even impossible to see if the ambient brightness is very high. If it's a video on youtube, the viewer can choose to watch it another time when it's not so bright. (But that viewer may never return to view it later, so you've lost a viewer for whatever effort you put in.)
My favorite example of when not to use dark mode is in conferences or live presentations. Projectors produce much dimmer output than monitors do, and most conferences are not given in total darkness. This is especially true if the environment has windows, such as an office meeting space. So keep this in mind if you are a presenter. You could put a lot of effort into making nice slides and having some animations, but your live audience may be practically unable to see most of it.
2. Video/image compression tends to result in poorer output for lower contrast content like dark mode syntax highlighted text. One can plainly see the loss of quality of syntax highlighted code text on dark mode video or stills.
The net result is, again, that your audience gets less benefit from your content creation effort. That's a shame for everyone.
It's similar to how Linux users appeared to make it a religious issue 10-25 years ago. Linux needed mindshare to be usable, or else you wouldn't have access to the software you needed to actually use Linux daily, so of course Linux proponents needed to push it hard so they could get support and mindshare. If all the software companies had "simply" made Linux versions of everything, so that anyone could simply choose Linux over Windows/Mac, this wouldn't have been necessary.
See comments on this article pro light mode, about people living in goblin caves or such. On the other hand, people will literally mock you for using Discord in light mode.
Ideally, everyone would have the options they wanted available to them, use them, and stfu about it and get on with life. In reality, though, people would still be fighting holy wars over it…
Viewers may also be in environments with low ambient light, where staring into a white light is painful.
> Video/image compression tends to result in poorer output for lower contrast content
Contrast and dark mode are two separate issues. Most popular dark themes are low-contrast for some reason, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I find that turning my phone/laptop/monitor brightness down as needed solves that problem. Conversely, however, I often find myself trying to turn my phone brightness up when it is already at maximum, and sadly I still can't see the content (because the ambient light is too strong).
There is a reason Google Maps switches between light and dark mode based on ambient light sensor. I challenge anyone to use maps in dark mode on a sunny day; there is no device bright enough to make dark mode content visible outside. It would also be absurd to burn so much energy trying to make thin colored lines and text be as bright as the opposite - dark lines on light background.
> Most popular dark themes are low-contrast for some reason, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Probably because viewing the highest contrast dark mode color schemes is more painful than switching to light mode and dimming the monitor.
Turning down brightness this much makes the content less readable, especially when it's low-contrast.
> There is a reason Google Maps switches between light and dark mode based on ambient light sensor. I challenge anyone to use maps in dark mode on a sunny day; there is no device bright enough to make dark mode content visible outside
I'm pretty sure I always use Google Maps in dark mode.
> It would also be absurd to burn so much energy trying to make thin colored lines and text be as bright as the opposite - dark lines on light background.
On AMOLED screens, dark mode saves energy.
> Probably because viewing the highest contrast dark mode color schemes is more painful than switching to light mode and dimming the monitor.
Not for me.
„Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.“
Similar story is for desktop except true black is not necessary and I prefer dark gray background for less contrast with font. White 27' monitor at evening is heavy for my eyes, even with 25% brightness, that I need for keeping calibration values.
Filter of blue light on phone is also very usefull at evening, I get easily tired.
However... For example for photography portfolios on web I prefer white background, especially for BW. I guess it reminds me more natural, paper white bacground, like prints has.
So it depends...
My eyes hurt after 1 or 2 minutes when I am forced to read things in dark mode. I even installed a plugin in Firefox to disable dark mode on sites that don't allow this (or do not support "reading mode" properly)
Clearly everyone is different. It's discouraging to see the number of people in this thread not understanding this. I'm glad the general consensus in technology is to offer us customization.
Depending on the file I guess mini-LED could also consume less power with a dark theme, right? If a whole region could be dimmed.
Is it true that an OLED displaying a dark color uses the same amount of power as one displaying a light color? I mean, clearly to get the full benefit you have to do full-black for the background, but I’d assume dark red should be less power than white.
The main reason I side dark mode though is that text on a black OLED in a totally dark room appears to just be floating there, which is cool looking.
Depending of course on the individual screen, so occasionally it can be higher. And my phone outdoors on a sunny day may very well be at 100%.
I do now realize that all websites don't necessarily have a black background. While I consider the website's points about dark mode, I disagree. Dark mode is easier to read - atleast for me and others.
If a website doesn't have a dark mode, extensions always work. Maybe for some people like the author, light mode is better and that's a personal preference.
Whether it matters to all the people all the time is a different question. But it 100% makes a big difference to many people.
Dark Mode _is_ good for your eyes, especially if you are feeling fatigued from reading so much text in light mode. Get a toggle dark mode reader for your browser! You don't have to choose one or* the other, but rather toggle as your eyes are feeling fatigued, or take a walk.
They're terrible, because they use very bright colors for highlight or improper contrast or author's aesthetics:
1. The bright color in dark mode just like a car coming to you in the dark stabbing your eyes with its huge headlights.
2. The improper contrast may be that they do not turn on the lights at night?
3. The essence of code is text, the readability of text is always the first, aesthetics is secondary, the nord theme is elegant and clean, I like it but I will never use it for reading or coding.
Dark mode is not intended for you to use in a purely dark environment, we need light at night even if you don't believe in god.
Here are some positive examples: "Atom One Dark Theme" and "Solarized Dark Vim" in vscode, jetbrains Darcula(not dracula, which is the object of criticism above).
So before answering the question of the title, we need to think: What should a correctly implemented dark mode look like?
One thing that helps with the "staring into a glowing rectangle of doom" thing is not having the background set to bright white. I was messing about with old Solaris when I found its terminal windows were much easier to read than xterm's white default. So I set my Emacs background to "OldLace" (#fdf5e6) rather than plain white.
Put the electronics in a different room. Go in the bedroom when it's time for bed. Leave the bedroom when it's not.
Sleep hygiene is important.
Most of the websites I build are light, so using a light theme keeps things more consistent when switching back and forth. I don’t think light or dark makes much difference but the consistency helps me.
OLED mode on my phone is definitely a treat for battery life, but then darker actually means less light instead of dark coloured light.
Between bad contrast (I'm looking at you Solarized dark) and just picking plainly too dark background most dark themes are just bad. I wonder if that might've skewed results, kinda hard to make objective "best light/dark theme"
I've switched to all Solarized Light terminal/editor/Firefox/GTK and turned off dark mode in the websites where that's a setting.
https://stitcher.io/blog/why-light-themes-are-better-accordi...
https://medium.com/codesphere-cloud/should-you-really-be-cod...
I've ended up liking Visual Studio Blue a lot for VSCode:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanijelM...
Then again, I think most new light themes are just designed wrong:
DARK READER extension for Firefox (and other browser) have a mode for both. You can set light mode with lowered brightness - white stays white, but is much less glaring.
Another anecdata key factor here is - too many people have their fonts set too small, myself included. I find that when I turn up the font sizes, my eye strains far less irrespective of my dark/light mode settings.
So my theory is, dark mode is prefered, were irregular times or crunch is prefered. Lightmode is in open, daylit offices or home offices, were you value & keep track of your time and life.
Eclipse: light mode Android Studio: light mode. IntelliJ: light mode VS Code: dark mode Text editing: light mode vim: dark mode (depends)
Windows cmd: black background MacOS terminal: white background, unless I bother to launch a Pro themed window. Linux (Ubuntu): black terminal, white FreeBSD: black
Whatever is there. The only customization I do is I manually edit my .vimrc and dump settings from memory.
My eyes are doing fine, no glasses so far.
This is achievable on OLED phones using software like (on android) Cf.Lumen, and setting it to a full redshift mode.
You will notice literally ZERO eye strain, even in the middle of the night, when you use this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x.pdf
Black on white causes myopia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062
Am I missing something?
For me it is dark mode on large screens and light mode on phones and tablets.
I simply use both, checkmate.
I just want consistency so my eyes don't have to adjust between apps/sites and enough contrast for legibility (WCAG says 4.5:1).
But, both modes hurt your eyes as long as you have to read on screen or even on paper. My aunt used to be pretty nearsighted as a student (-6.00 on both eyes), after she graduated and started a job that only required a little reading, her vision improved dramatically to better than -1.50 within a year. A few years later she completely got rid of eye glasses.
I do find that Dark Mode is not helpful in bright sunlight, and can lead to my iPhone screen acting like a mirror, which is not good. But that doesn't stop me from using it at night!
HN needs to add dark mode. Until then, I've been using this theme with the Stylus addon. Way better!
https://userstyles.world/style/1898/hacker-news-dynamic-dark
Thankfully twitter has this as an option as well. But I'm all for companies having 4 presets & one all out custom themeing if customers prefer it- White, Off-white/paper, dark(OLED black) & Nord(blue-grey)
In any case, whether its a trend, saves battery, helps or hurts the eyes, I can certainly say its a great accessibility feature.
Sometime, when I want a change of perspective, I switch to different theme for a couple of days/weeks/months and then change again, and again, and again...
I've noticed just changing the theme can help refocus.
It is a bit like changing the layout of your house to bring changes to your life.
(only it's so much easier with M-x customize-theme)
But working most of the day in front of the screen causes eye strain. So, I tried `redshift` and that helped. These days I keep it at 3000K all the time. And I found that reading on my big computer screen with redshift is less straining compared to Kindle.
Do your corrective lenses not correct for astigmatism?
The article seems to try to make an argument that non-darkmode is better, but the gap is so tiny it reminds me of the Coleman, Dvorak, QWERTY, etc arguments.
The differences are so tiny just do what you want.
Did try to get yellow light e-ink but not as nice as reading on ipad.
Continue to struggle then.
But having a monitor on in the dark, even if I use flux/night vision and even with low brightness physically hurts my eyes compared to just using dark mode on my apps.
But I always end up switching back to a light theme because it feels depressing to look at a dark screen all day.
Source: I got "very pure" on the tech bro purity test
The use of the "tech bro" stereotype in the article really rubs me the wrong way. It's a complete rhetorical low blow.
It's identifying the opposite of the author's opinion with a group, and then portraying that group in a way so that the reader would rather distance themselves from that group than identify with that group. This triggers in-group/out-group psychology along the lines of: "My enemy's enemy must be my friend", or "My opinion should probably be the opposite of the opinion held by people I don't like." ...an obvious logical fallacy.
In the compound "tech bro" it's actually the word "bro" that does the heavylifting to make the group unsympathetic. The rhetoric wouldn't work with "techies", but would work equally well with "frat bro". Outside of the U.S., "bro" is not even a readily recognizable cultural stereotype at all. For example people in the tech sector in Europe who are in their 50s and who like how dark mode reminds them of IBM terminals that existed back when they were young might have a preference for dark mode, but they surely don't fit the stereotype of a "tech bro". Young people into gaming aesthetics might like it too, but they aren't always tech bros.
Preferences for light mode / dark mode are pretty much subjective personal preferences or maybe to some extent culturally ingrained, but in a way that has little or nothing to do with being a "bro". It's like saying: "So you like to have a lot of black on your screen? Do you know who else liked black? Mussolini! So, do you still want all that black on your screen now, like a fascist pig? Or do you do what I tell you to do now, and set your screen mode to light?"
You eloquently summed up exactly the thought process & distaste I experienced but in a way which adds some conversational pithiness rather than the pablum of my throwaway jest.
10 points to gryffindor!
When I pair program or someone is screen sharing on zoom, I need to ask for the other person to switch modes.
That said, dark themes look cool.
The reverse, a blob of light on a dark background, is the MOST visible thing.
I stopped reading there.
To be fair, I’d say they’re both easy to see. However, given a daytime silhouette vs. a bright light at night, the silhouette has many other blobs competing for attention.
If I read text without dark mode enabled I see the floaters hopping from word to word as if I’m singing in a karaoke bar.
I cannot tolerate more than a page of dead tree books before getting into a major headache situation.
Some sort of back-lit magnifier is needed.
Any suggestions?
Black on white hurts
White on black hurts
I use dark gray on light olive (sort of like HN's background). But light gray on dark gray works fine too.
In this sentence, I feel like I witnessed the author ascend straight up his own ass. Author is basically saying:
“Objective studies show that [subjective topic] is actually…”
> This post is day 04 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. If you want to get involved, you can get more info from https://100daystooffload.com.
Ah, so it’s trendy yuppycore bs. That explains it.
Similarly, a scientific study has proven that smoking is good for you and protects you from Covid....
(/s)
black pixels are better than white pixels.
This blog post and most replies are misinformation and misunderstanding, and people posting their own anecdotes as advice.
If you aren't considering the macula, emmetropization, circadian rhythms, and corneal thinning, then please don't give advice to others on this topic.
Most people, this blog post author included, don't understand what "good for your eyes" means. For some reason, when talking about eye health, people resort to anecdotes and guessing.
I'm pretty sure there's no scientific consensus on this issue at all.
recently I bought rose tinted glasses mainly so when I had to deal with white screens I really didn't it's been awesome. they're clip ons so I've been wearing my glasses more often too.
tldr: benefit to eye strain or not light aversion is also a very real thing and that can be averted by dark screens.
Not only are the "decide if this string of characters is a word" tests showing a maximum difference of around 30% for dark v light mode in simulated night with small fonts but, that's not what most people are doing most of the time when reading things and it's certainly not what programmers are doing when reading code. So that almost certainly does not translate directly to X% slower reading performance in real world scenarios. This real world vs lab test difference alone can easily account for why so many people assert that dark mode is better for them even though the evidence sometimes suggests it shouldn't be. And that doesn't score a point for either camp. It means there's still much we don't know. So any conclusions are tentative at best.
Studies on the mechanics of reading, especially on the web, have shown that much of the time people are actually scanning and identifying whole phrases or sentences as one pattern. Hence I can write and the cow jumped over the moom and more than half the people who read that will not notice the second m swapped in. Same trick applies with jumped over the room. Which many will literally see as jumped over the moon even though two letters are different now and it's an actual different word at the end. It's even harder to see correctly because I already primed your memory with the typical phrase. Of course, people unfamiliar with that phrase won't have a problem with it. They have to parse each word anyway. No bigger pattern in memory. This is even worse when people are scanning whole web pages looking for patterns that might match content they are interested in. And most of the time programmers are reading blocks of text, it is to find an answer or concept they need in order to continue coding.
Quoting the same group as in the OP: https://creativehandles.com/blog-posts/79/4-types-of-eye-tra...
People do this in speech too, try making a statement to some friends that sounds phonetically similar to a common catch phrase or something you know they'd be triggered by but actually be saying something different and benign. See how often they react as if you said the common or triggering phrase anyway. For extra fun, follow up later and see how many people swear they actually remember you saying the thing you didn't say.
I suspect this pattern recognition trick is even more at play in reading and writing code. When one is fluent in a language, we don't actually need to read the symbols to know what a block of code is doing. Structures are so deliberately similar that one can recognize conditionals and loops for what they are without reading the words "if" or "while", this goes on to the content of those blocks and any function calls as well. Many functions use similar names for similar actions in code regardless of the program space because humans being humans.
To spot this one in action, take notice of how certain ways of writing particular programming patterns are jarring every time you read them, to the point that you feel the need to change it even though it's perfectly functional. It's not the code per se, it's the readability. It's particularly egregious when someone gets a pattern around 70 to 80% correct but then does something different for one or two components of the overall pattern. You get annoyed reading it because it's like hearing someone mispronounce a word or change one word in a commonly used phrase. The pattern is there in your brain, it starts to match, you build up an expectation that the next parts will match. If it does, satisfaction; if it doesn't, frustration. Now your brain has to do more work to read in and learn what the non-matching parts are doing. This expectation tells you that you would rather be pattern matching large blocks of code than reading each syntax element.
When reading in this manner, it's actually more important to have proper syntax highlighting than any specific contrast ratio between the background and the text. I could totally see light mode being a consistent hindrance here too. Not sure about that but it would explain a lot about the prevalence of preferences in general population vs programmers. For good syntax highlighting you want a lot of colors that contrast against both the background and the other syntax elements. Some shades of yellow and green probably don't do as well against a white background as a dark one for example, especially if used for similar shaped elements that often show up close to each other.
Regardless of how that goes, or if we ever even find out whether this matters to the light v dark debate, the nuances around the way humans read differently in different situations are not even being addressed in the studies yet. That observation alone should give people pause before confidently claiming to know anything here and certainly before asserting that someone is wrong to have the preferences they have.
Just something to think about.
He says eye strain is caused by blue light. That's why he uses light mode.
That makes no sense. Blue light is ORTHOGONAL to the question of whether Dark Mode or Light Mode is better for your eyes.
Does light mode cause eye strain does dark mode cause eye strain? Which is better for your eyes? He doesn't find any research studies comparing the two and he grabs an unrelated study and claims that blue light is the only source of eye strain. I can assure blue light is NOT the only source of eye strain.
This article is biased. He's picking and choosing studies to support a biased agenda.