Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

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I code in the sun a fair amount just with a Macbook. Not direct direct sun - but outdoors on an English summer's day.

Main things are:

1. Use light mode not dark mode

2. Max out screen brightness (obvs) - there are hacks for HDR displays to make them even brighter but my Macbook is too old.

Coding is fine but anything that requires looking at images (low contrast UI design in particular) sucks. However this probably forces you to design good accessible UIs!

I also use a Quest 3 as a display when I can as that also solves the sunlight problem and gives me a huge virtual display to boot.

The biggest thing I'm lacking is a remote desktop app that doesn't mess with my muscle memory. Keys like escape and alt-tab often aren't handled correctly over remote desktop (Chrome Remote Desktop is the best thing I've found so far but that still doesn't handle alt-tab between Mac and PC)

I’m unsure if the same applies to older macbook screens, but I’ve found that polarized sunglasses help alot with reducing glare and the marks/dust on the retina screen. Combined with the HDR hacks you mentioned above I can sit in sun with sunglasses and still keep dark mode on while coding

I use lightmode full time for that exact reason. Other developers tend to think it's weird when pair programming or whatnot.

At night, I just use macos built-in accessibility functions to invert the screen. Work pretty well but sometimes you have to un-invert to view photos.

Why not toggle light and dark mode and set things to follow the system? That works great for me in macOS, these days things that doesn’t support that are rare. I actually can’t recall the last app (that _i_ use) that wasn’t a website that doesn’t support light vs dark mode and follow system settings.

I've found the opposite, I suppose. I've found I'm more likely to run across apps or sites that don't support dark mode than sites that are natively dark that invert makes worse (because they turn light).

> English summer's day

I don't think that's too relevant then.

The new nano-texture displays are great for this as well. I was able to get some work done in direct sunlight on a Spanish afternoon, while wearing (non-polarised) sunglasses.

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