I have mild astigmatism and dark themes simply don’t work for me. macOS dark mode gives me nausea. For me it’s old school plain white IDE.

I have about 40degree astigmatism, but also myopia. I blow hot & cold with dark mode. It’s definitely NOT the “one true way” that it seems to be for other devs. It hadn’t occurred to me that my astigmatism might affect perception in dark mode differently. I’ll look out for that. Thanks!

Paper is black on white for a reason... I never understood dark modes and my eyesight is surprisingly good (as in, no glasses needed) after staring at computer screens for a good part of past 20 years. Am I just old?

> Paper is black on white for a reason

That's a bullshit argument when you're talking about technology thousands of years old made with material constraints. How would parchment be rendered black, smear it with soot, which would then rub off on everything it touched? Would you instead ink the entire page? Would something other than parchment be used, and if so what? And what white pigments would have lent themselves to writing? With dark ink you have numerous options, some of them cheaper than dirt. For white pigments you're looking at chalk or lead oxides, neither of which is nearly as available as a little charcoal.

I'm not disputing that for non-emissive text, dark on light is better. But our culture adopting this scheme had a lot more to do with materials that were available in the past than anything else. The alternative wasn't evaluated because it was simply less practical to implement.

Is this true? that its for a reason other than its easier to make dark colored ink and to bleach paper white rather than the other way around?

Dark mode is bad for your eyes in a light environment as it causes them to work harder. Its good in the dark though, hence the name. Its a mode that should be used in the dark.

I find the whole dark mode fashion pretty unfathomable. I use it only in the dark and it's wonderful in that case, but people seem to want it on all the time for all the things.

You say you can't fathom it, but then you seem to subsequently fathom it. Dark themes are nice in dark rooms. If you assume most people spend most of their screen time in well lit environments, then puzzlement might seem warranted. But why assume something which leads to perplexing conclusions? The obvious answer is that people who prefer dark themes also tend to work in dark rooms.

When I'm on my balcony in the sun, I use a light theme. But that's only a few hours a day during the summer. Most of the time I'm indoors with the lights low and my themes dark.

I mostly see people at work using dark mode during the day time and cheering anytime anything gets dark mode.

I get it in dark rooms, but I get the sense there is this trend where people like dark mode because they like dark mode and they don't care what time of day it is. Seems more like fashion than anything practical, though I can certainly understand there is a practical application to it, and giving users control of it is good.

Indoors 'during the daytime' is still pretty dark in a great many rooms, often due to the preference of the rooms occupants. So it really has little to do with the time of day. Right now it's early in the afternoon for me; the sun is still up but it's overcast, my window blinds closed, and my lights aren't turned on because there is no reason for them to be on. Dark mode works great in these sort of dim conditions. It's really a matter of comfort, not fashion.

As for 'at work', it's been my experience that offices generally aren't very bright. Not even remotely as bright as daylight, nor even as bright as electric lighting could be. Those overhead florescent bulbs produce a harsh shade of light.. but not all that much of it. That's why people squint or put on sunglasses when they walk out of office buildings during the day.

I'm talking about people in well lit environments who don't care how well or not it's lit, they just use dark mode because dark mode.

My terminal is solarized light, and I had to battle with Windows to let me use a very light-grey as an accent color (not the off-white I wanted, but good enough)

Everything matches, even notepad.

At night, if I find the glaring brightness hurts my eyes even at the minimum level my LCD will allow, I just invert the screen colors - and everything still matches!

I use flux on my windows box to tone down the colour temperature at night, and it's a real eye saver.

Interesting. I have astigmatism too, but never had any idea it would have any bearing with something like a colour scheme. I'm not sure I like the new dark theme and now I'm wondering if it's just because it's new or because of astigmatism

Doesn’t have to be white though, I’ve used anoff white for as long as I remember. Say #f8f8f8, or a warmer tone. i think there is a big difference in terms of luminosity by just lowering the rgb a few notches.

I have quite a bit of astigmatism as well but the dark mode feels fine for me. Interesting.

It's definitely a personal thing—some people love dark mode (myself included) but some people either don't prefer it or can't stand it.

As long as designers understand and support both light and dark, it's good to have the option.

For me, any time I pop open HN or Google Drive, my eyes have to take a second to adjust to the glaring brightness compared to everything else on the screen.

It's kind of interesting that we started computing with dark mode and when we jumped to windowing systems, for some reason that coincided with move to white on black. Maybe it was more familiar for office workers used to paper.

There's no absolute reason why the evolution happened that way that I can say. It was all more or less arbitrary design decisions.

This old Sparcstation I managed to get for free years ago would display everything in "light mode" by default. If you would boot Linux or NetBSD to the console it would be a white background with black text.

Image: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/21/...

I don't know how common this was, or if it's something that was unique to these sparcstations.

I think it's because computers like the Mac were geared around desktop publishing.

> we started computing with dark mode

Computing with “light mode” preceded video terminals!