10 points by morkalork 3 days ago
It looks like dark-mode themes have finally taken off in the mainstream and become the default in many new apps and websites. The bright white text on a black background also feels like my eyes are being stabbed when reading it. Am I alone in this? Are all trendy designers kids with good vision?
I have no astigmatism. If something is on dark mode with no easily discovered option to switch it at the top of the screen I am more than likely to close the website or remove the app.
Im have bad eyes and use https://www.nordtheme.com/ on everything I can.
But things like SaaS products, banking app, anything official or business related, I kind of prefer regular light mode. Most dark modes are bad. I prefer github and gitlab in light mode. Linear does darkmode well enough to use.
Same. My myopia is minimal but the astigmatism bad enough that I have to squint super hard to read non-giant text without glasses and even then it’s 30% guesswork. So the computer glasses correct only for astigmatism. But it’s almost equally bad in light mode and dark mode.
I have separate distance glasses (also with astigmatism correction) for driving and such, but they give me headaches if worn indoors.
I used to love dark mode, but in the summer months, I came to feel that it's overly depressive, possibly affecting my mood.
In the winter months, it's slightly more usable because of association with lower lighting, darkness and even coziness. However, I think it can affect mood irrespective of the time of year.
Nowadays, I'm often experimenting with the idea of displays which are backlit with colours other than pure white or pure black.
I have astigmatism and have not found any issues with glares in white-on-black, I think you should use themes with dark/light grey/blue/etc. anyways and not directly white and black.
However I do find light themes more pleasant, obviously at night I tend to switch to a dark theme but during the day I prefer to keep them light, I find them more pleasant and aesthetic.
I have astigmatism and light theme is way less tiring than dark ones. I've switched everything to light. Even terminals.
Now the next item on my list is to eliminate colors from CLI applications. The only time I ever find them useful enough is added/removed from diff.
Astigmatic and find it difficult to concentrate on dark mode. Light mode burns my eyes so I go with themes like Cobalt 2 on VS Code that are less harsh yet provide enough contrast to allow me to identify what I am scanning for.
I don't know about the worst, but it's up there.
And it's not as if this question hadn't been definitively settled by human-factors researchers in the last century. Light text on a dark background is harder to read on a screen. No room for debate, the studies have been done and replicated. There's a reason why computing left "dark mode" in a junk heap full of green- and amber-phosphor CRT monitors.
Exactly. There's no reason why an individual user shouldn't prefer dark mode, and there's no reason why a site shouldn't offer it. But if you run a popular site, it's an asshole move to force it on your users, as so many sites are doing these days.
I don't have astigmatism, but I also find dark mode unpleasant.
My memory is that it became a thing not so much because of eye comfort but because OLED displays use less power when displaying black. I could be misremembering, though.