I do it for both the monitor and the TV, with two cheap "Ingared" lamps from IKEA; can recommend.
Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
How does one find these "hidden" features?
Unfortunately it doesn't reduce the dimmest level on my MBP. The bottom 4 subdivisions look identical. Like level 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 are all the same brightness, only 1.25+ starts to get brighter.
The lowest level is still too bright at night. That's unfortunate.
However it does reduce the dimmest level of the keyboard illumination!
That's great. I always found the keyboard too bright at its lowest level at night, but some illumination at night would be helpful for obvious reasons. Now I can enjoy 3 subdivisions lower - thank you :-)
LCDs have poor blacks because they're a filter put in front of a lamp, so to render black, they have to try and block as much light as possible, but our visual perception is logarithmic and adaptive, making them look quite bad. The workaround is to add bias light behind the monitor; it quite literally provides a bias for the eye to keep it inside a certain adaption range, which reduces the perceived poorness of dark tones. (It also is more ergonomic.).
Go old school for editing. Use something like TECO or ed or Rob Pike, David Tilbrook, Hugh Redelmeier and Tom Duff's Unix version of QED [1].
The small LCD is for seeing the command you are currently typing and a little command history.
With those editors you entered editing commands but did not see the results until you asked for them. You'd tell the editor to show you the current line plus say 10 lines before and after. Then you'd give it commands to edit the current line, such as telling it to change the text "float" to "double", or telling it to insert a new line before the current line, and so on. When you had done enough changes that you needed to refresh your notion of the current state of the file, you'd ask it to show you again.
Even the older generation, slower e-ink screens would be fast enough for that kind of work.
Maybe instead of putting the small LCD display at the bottom of the e-ink screen, make it a separate unit that can attach to the e-ink screen or attach to the top of your keyboard or stand alone somewhere if you prefer.
The problem here doesn't seem that different from coding over a slow network, something that's been possible for quite a while.
But i'd rather not do it daily.
https://gizmodo.com/the-first-color-e-ink-devices-are-finall...
It's just a matter of time before a major brand (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) decides to take a chance and use it to make a big multipurpose tablet.
Brightness isn't nearly as bad for eye strain has contrast between the screen and ambient light.
Nocturne would let you invert your entire screen, then shift it to monochrome (ideally red). Obviously useless for gaming or color work, but I’ve not run across anything since that’s so great for late night text work across the whole OS.
f.lux can do invert and redshift though: shift+alt+end
At a quick google there's nothing under 3k and they're either 21" (too small) or 55" (fine for console gaming but not for programming if you ask me).
Regarding size for programming, I use a 40 inch monitor and wouldn't mind additional width.
Say, are there any 16:10 oleds? :)
Edit: Hmm, one 40" 4k instead of 2x24" 1920x1200. Maybe.
Not that LG has any 40" oleds, the smallest i see (locally) is 55".
Here is the 48 inch oled from LG: https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-oled48cxpub-oled-4k-tv
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/picture-quality/contras...
Incidentally this is how LCDs became so bright. So they can claim better contrast.
Of course i'm talking about text work here.
Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basically a lamp shining into your eyes all day. At least the oled on my phone looks like it doesn't put out light where it shouldn't.
For gaming, i'm not latency sensitive, but then i don't play twitch shooters any more. I'm more the kind that buys mid-low range video cards and turns on the fps limiter where it's available.