Yeah, I'm not sure you can say anything meaningful about eye strain and readability without accounting for room lighting, glare, and other reflective surfaces and distractions. If I'm in a dark room with a bright screen, it's almost physically painful to stare at the screen. I have to turn the brightness way down, and then I lose contrast and have to strain even more. In an office with horrible flourescent lighting, highly-reflective white walls and surfaces, metallic accents reflecting light into my peripheral vision, reflective monitors (Apple displays are the worst), and eyeglasses, I'm practically blinded. The last thing I want is glaring white light from my application windows.

There are things other than black-on-white and the inverse. I've been using Solarized dark where possible for years, especially in code windows. White-on-black is horrible, but pastel colors on a slate blue-gray background is the most comfortable option for me.

If you're using a monitor with separate brightness and contrast settings, you might also choose to lower the contrast a bit. When my monitor's contrast is at 75%, white doesn't really get less bright until somewhere around 30% brightness. But I'd I lower contrast to 50%, then 50% brightness makes a bigger difference, without losing readability.

Exactly this. I don't use dark mode during the day, but sure as hell dark mode by night saves my eyes.

I use light mode when I am working outside (which is a lot now that I work from home) or when I am at the office as it's got bright lights. At night or when I am in a darker environment in general, dark mode is great. Being able to quickly adjust the screen brightness also helps immensely (more so than the actual mode, actually... if I had to choose a single mode, it would be light mode, as dark mode is totally un-usable in a very light room/outside).

I honestly don't know why they didn't use the light sensor like in the iPhone.

Exactly! When I started using dark mode, it felt so much more pleasant for my eyes. After a while I realized this was because I was in generally dark environments a lot, so I started to switch up my environment instead: I.e. light up the room with a large ceiling lamp instead of just a small reading lamp on a desk etc.

I noticed when I'm working in the morning or generally when it's bright outside, it's sooo much more relaxing with black on white text. With night mode, I'd need to up the brightness way more to be able to comfortably read and type. It was sort of a revelation to me because the "night mode is better" mindset was so engrained into my mind at that point.

iOS was late to the dark theme train, but they did it right. One setting can change between light and dark depending on time of day, sunset times, etc.

I just change the brightness of the monitor twice a day.

...buried 2 or 3 menu layers deep, using a magic sequence of three buttons to handle all the up-down/left-right multi-level hierarchical menu navigation complexities.

One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)

TV's should do this too. With smart TV's/rokus/firesticks/whatever, what's the use of having a channel toggle? Repurpose that for one-button brightness shifts. I don't need my TV being a spotlight into my face when I turn it on to watch a movie at night with the lights dimmed.

Dark mode and red shift are helpful, but really this thread nails it... it's relative contrast that is the big eyestrain contributor. It should be as easy to change brightness as it is volume.

> seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate

I'm sorry, what?

I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth.

I can't stand keyboards without function keys, or where you have to press Fn to activate them.

That's because you're used to them, that's fine. Many of those actions can be done via key combos or other keys (esp on a Mac), like C+R to refresh, C+Sh+I for browser console or Enter to rename a file. Function keys at this point are certainly old school and could even be considered an atavism, like the Print Screen button or the numeric keypad.

Some functions have replacements, others don't. Just one example: both F5 and CTRL-R in browsers do a refresh; CTRL-F5 does a hard refresh (also renews the cache); I don't think there's a non-function-key alternative for that. Losing the function keys would be a major nuisance.

The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.

I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.

In the meaning of outdated artifacts, like those turbo buttons on old PC boxes or three button mice. Fn + arrow keys or fn+bksp for del easily replace the specific navigation keys and are for me easier to find by touch with less movement of the wrist.

I had the impression you meant something like that, but I wasn't sure (I'm not a native English speaker) so I looked it up and the dictionary gave me a different meaning, so that got me confused.

In Firefox CTRL+SHIFT+R does a hard refresh as well. I don’t know about other browsers.

Tons of software uses the function keys, especially Windows/cross-platform software. Lots of engineering tools, editing tools, content authoring, programming, etc.

Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, including Windows itself (which lots of people run using Bootcamp or Parallels). Maybe they're weird, I don't know. Momentum is a powerful force, especially when it comes to software design.

Also for the record, Print Screen takes a screenshot on Windows (and on a lot of Linux systems), which is intuitive and simple. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's an abandoned key.

It's insane how monitor software hasn't developed an inch from the 90s. How hard can it be to have an open API for the basic controls at least so the OS can adjust them? Everything about my monitor is great - 144hz refresh rate, great viewing angle and colors - except if I want to change any of the physical properties (brightness, contrast) I'm clicking around on a variety of buttons that I can't see like I'm trying to set the clock on my VCR.

This actually exists, and it’s called DDC/CI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel

I only recently learned about it myself while setting up a new monitor and asking myself wtf is this DDC/CI setting in the menu.

Thanks for the hot tip! I've been struggling with my monitor's menu buttons, but after reading your comment I found the macOS tool MonitorControl, which works perfectly.

I can control laptop brightness with `/sys/class/backlight/foo`, and my asus external monitor advertises capabilities over hdmi with `modprobe i2c-dev` and then `ddcutil capabilities`. Apparently this is governed by something called MCCS. You can find more info on the arch wiki.

I have a script with ddccontrol to change brightness of my external monitor:

    ddccontrol -r 0x10 -w ${NUM}0  dev:/dev/i2c-${DEV_NUM}

The internal:

    BACKLIGHT_PATH="/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"
    sh -c "echo ${NUM} > $BACKLIGHT_PATH"

The numbers are a slightly different scale, so I adjust them in the script.

If your monitor supports DDC [1] you can control the brightness with MonitorControl [2]. It's fantastic. However it's basically impossible to figure out before buying if monitors do or don't support DDC. In general Dell Ultrasharps do, and I was surprised when the old Acer I'm on now did as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel [2] https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

I agree that brightness should be easier to reach. On my Dell monitor, it can be configured to be behind one button press, then changed with up / down. On my LG monitor, it's atrocious. Have to go 2-3 layers deep with an awful joystick.

This is one of the reasons I absolutely love my Apple display. It changes brightness automatically and most of the time it does it right.

Also, DDC/CI is a thing and (sometimes) works.

On Windows, I've found Twinkle Tray on the store works reasonably well.

For Linux there's ddcci-dkms on Ubuntu and ddcci-driver-linux-dkms for Arch Linux (on the AUR). They allow configuring the brightness as a regular backlight device. See the Arch Linux Wiki [0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight#External_moni...

https://clickmonitorddc.bplaced.net/ I rarely use the interface anymore, this software has replaced it. Unfortunately I'm unaware of anything that works well for any other operating system. There's a rust library I've used in the past for DDC I think, but that means coding your own implementations, and I was only making a source switcher

> seriously, who uses F-keys?

Mainframe programmers.

They are an essential part of interacting with an IBM mainframe (even for basic things like paging up and down through documents).

> "One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons"

Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.

I just got a new Surface tablet, and the tablet cover keyboard's brightness buttons definitely control the screen, not the keyboard lighting.

> Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)

If the keyboard has media keys, then, generally speaking, F2 and F3 will be linked to brightness by default.

I have an external keyboard that's a common split-ergo design, probably one of the top 3 workhorses on amazon for "ergo keyboard" (Apple hardware is pretty, but it's not ergonomic).

By dumb luck I just found that it's ScrLk and Pause/Break that do brightness controls on my external monitor on os-x.

I wish apple made it as easy to remap these kinds of global shortcut keys as IDE's do.

Back in the day of CRTs there used to be a dial on monitors to set the brighness. Have you only ever used Apple computers?

Yeah, now the brightness controls are a touch screen themselves.

That’s not even a joke.

One more nice thing that some computers do is automatically adjusting brightness depending on your ambient light. Like phones which have dedicated light sensor. But at least my computer uses webcam (or sensor near a webcam) to determine ambient brightness and adjust monitor brightness. EDIT. ah, yes, and i don't use external monitor. But makes me think, why monitor manufacturers have not added that one light sensor to their products.

And sync multiple monitors to have the same brightness twice a day?

Even with brightness adjustments, working in complete dark at night the dark mode is much easier to use. The keyboard lights on the lowest level is a bit too bright in these conditions, white screens are a punch in the face for me.

F.lux deserves a mention

I’ve been using Flux for a decade and it was my saviour from headaches and eye strain. Before that I was experimenting with dark themes and after running into f.lux I never really needed to. Im usually ok with whatever default theme is. I’been using f-lux at the lowest temperature and my eye strain never came back.

It was so successful that the basic functionality is built into every OS I can think of these days.

redshift is also an option.

Exactly this. If I have pager duty and wake up in the night and need to read an e-mail (LCD screen), light mode blinds me so much I cannot even keep my eyes open. With dark mode I can read fine.

This is what I like about iOS (and probably every OS has it): after sundown, turn on dark mode.