I am not sure exactly when the recent trend towards dark editor themes started but I wonder if it was around the same time that WLED LCD backlighting took over? I love white themes on my CFL monitor but not so much on my WLED laptop.
I also think maybe many people started preferring dark colour schemes because colours pop and look more saturated against black, and so it looks better in screenshots etc.
No, I'm talking about what's true of the population as a whole (but not every individual member) as if it was the driver of the trend the poster I was responding to questioned...because it is.
IIRC, the issue is legibility more than eyestrain (though they are related) and light themes are still better with normal vision, but a majority of the adult population has one or more of the vision issues that reverse this (astigmatism being the main one, and alone accounting for nearly 50%.)
I claim it’s not true. If one would measure The light flux of my screen I’m sure it wouldn’t be higher than that of the paper when reading in good light conditions. I claim that it’s dependent of how one configures his display.
I used to battle too against "dark modes". But I was forced to use VSCode for one project (since a couple of months), and I have to say that I became so used to it that now I want to use "dark mode" everywhere I can. Unfortunately IDEs for embedded like KEIL uVision will never get such feature, and now it's a pain to go back to white background.
No. It's photons, and the photons count is the same for a given flux. If your screen emits more photons, it's because you've set the background light too high. That's that user configurable setting I've mentioned in the first post. If you have problems with reflection of some other light source and you solved it by turning it off and sitting in the dark room, you of course have to reduce the background light of your monitor to match the ambient light conditions.
Because we're mostly using emissive displays, and it turns out that trying to imitate what works on paper on an emissive display sucks for long term use (though it looks pretty at a glance, and if you are composing things for print WYSIWYG may be more important than what is most comfortable on the screen.) We tried light themes as the almost invariable rule for the first several decades of GUIs, but recently got over it.
(Light backgrounds are awesome on reflective media, and if eInk was cheap and fast enough to use for primary monitors for coding we’d do that.)