Great article that collected a lot of info that I usually wind up looking for separately.
But I have to ask: do people really find color schemes like this easier to read? I'm squinting at it throughout.
But I have to ask: do people really find color schemes like this easier to read? I'm squinting at it throughout.
Same here. I have anecdotally noted that many people, like myself, who were around in the days of actual green screen terminals and later green monochrome monitors are far less likely to prefer dark mode than younger people.
For me, the advent of color screens that made black-on-white text possible was a huge improvement in terms of readability and eye strain reduction, and I cannot imagine going back to the old ways.
The constant "light mode hurts my eyes!" never made sense to me until I tried using my computer in a completely dark room. So I think the trend over the past decade isn't really dark mode itself, it's more people using screens in dark rooms.
And as someone else mentioned, dark rooms may be part of it too. I find light backgrounds less obnoxious in brighter light, but i avoid brighter lights by preference.
Indeed, for the past decade I also prefer the light themes, though I find these dark themes pretty usable too: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures
As I've noticed, the main problem with dark themes is the low contrast usually. These modus themes were designed scientifically, to meet the contrast ratios recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Also, back in those days mono-monitor days, people just kept the brightness at the same level they used during the day and complained how tiring is it for their eyes to "use the computer for so many hours".
My eyes never got tired, because I was constantly adjusting the brightness to match the ambient lighting and I've drastically lowered it, when I was coding in dark.
I've noticed that dark-theme users (eg during live streaming) crank up their brightness/contrast to compensate for the low-contrast dark themes, then they are surprised to be blinded when they open a webpage, which is extremely likely to be light themed and they keep complaining about light themes...
On the whole, this actually allows you to achieve the same contrast level with lower total light emission. If you are in fact clinically light sensitive and you also have difficulty with low contrast, you just can't achieve the balance of contrast you need as effectively with light themes.
> then they are surprised to be blinded when they open a webpage, which is extremely likely to be light themed
For me it's well worth it to sacrifice the 'artistic integrity' of web designers' intentions and use something like Dark Reader or Midnight Lizard to force a dark theme across the whole web.
No, and also not the monospace font for prose.
I simply turned off style sheets in Firefox (Alt+V Y M [View menu->Page Style->No Style]) to get rid of the website color scheme and have it render using the colors I have set as default in Firefox.
That scheme works great for me. Not just "dark mode," if it were my site i'd have made the colors more neon-ish.