Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily.
Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too.
But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.
I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite.
If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport
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I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.”
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.
Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.
The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.
For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
99% of vscode themes are like the one he showed. IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color.
You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).
There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.
Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).
I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once (bold cursive if it is a parameter, god forbid): instant attention to what is usually a code-smell.
In my usage, the coloring allows my eyes to “snap” to relevant chunks of code and restrict scanning to the bounds of those chunks.
Functionally it seems similar to spatial memory where landmarks are used as navigation shorthand and is impaired in circumstances where everything looks the same (e.g. in one of those sprawling suburbs with 100 of the same house).
No one needs it, but it's nice to have. It's the difference between being partially or fully colorblind or not being so, in terms of being able to distinguish parts of the codebase more easily. That is what the parent means by "easier to parse code."
> I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once
Exactly, everyone is different, as personally I'd hate cursive and ligatures. Think of it as, what works for you doesn't work for everyone, and what works for them (color) doesn't work for you. But let people have their preferences.
Agreed, they should be using color schemes that are TreeSitter compatible so for example "React" and "window.React" are not the exact same color, as they are semantically two different things.
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.
"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."
Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.
Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.
When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.
So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to
1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.
2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.
3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac
Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.
The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Most of the books I've read this year and last year had a somewhat yellow-ish tint to them (they were newly printed). I know I'm not the only person bothered by pure white paper in books.
I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”
The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?
I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.
If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.
When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
I use pure 000000 and FFFFFF on an OLED monitor, contrast is fantastic. I agree though on general lackluster gray-based dark modes, they can be worse to read.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...
Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me.
I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.
Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them?
(Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1].
Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.
This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.
Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.
If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.
For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred.
Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even.
If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white)
The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen.
I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.)
There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.
I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.
Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:
- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.
- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.
If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt.
It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.
There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode
A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds.
And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way.
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.
Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
> but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
Not really anymore these days, because most use OLED, miniLED, or sufficiently good LCD tech that backlight bleed is not much of an issue.
> So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.
The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!"
Meanwhile:
- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application
- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.
- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.
I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters..
QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it.
#000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark.
This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.
In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps.
Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
> My eyes will thank you
Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily.
Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too.
But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.
I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite.
If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport
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I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.”
Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I've never seen a book actually radiate it's own light.
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.
Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
If it helps, you can disable auto brightness in accessibility settings so that only manual change remains
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.
The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.
For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
> because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme.
That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants.
Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.
Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
It took a couple of days 10+ years ago to see what the fuss is about (I was an avid “christmas-lighter” before), and I never came back.
Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
99% of vscode themes are like the one he showed. IMO, the best themes do typically have minimal/functional highlights, which results in more text that is the base color.
Why though?
You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).
There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.
Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).
I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once (bold cursive if it is a parameter, god forbid): instant attention to what is usually a code-smell.
In my usage, the coloring allows my eyes to “snap” to relevant chunks of code and restrict scanning to the bounds of those chunks.
Functionally it seems similar to spatial memory where landmarks are used as navigation shorthand and is impaired in circumstances where everything looks the same (e.g. in one of those sprawling suburbs with 100 of the same house).
No one needs it, but it's nice to have. It's the difference between being partially or fully colorblind or not being so, in terms of being able to distinguish parts of the codebase more easily. That is what the parent means by "easier to parse code."
> I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once
Exactly, everyone is different, as personally I'd hate cursive and ligatures. Think of it as, what works for you doesn't work for everyone, and what works for them (color) doesn't work for you. But let people have their preferences.
> as personally I'd hate cursive
Exactly the reason to fix the code so that there is only a single assignment and therefore no cursive :-)
Agreed, they should be using color schemes that are TreeSitter compatible so for example "React" and "window.React" are not the exact same color, as they are semantically two different things.
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.
"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."
Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.
Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.
When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.
So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to
1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.
2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.
3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac
Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.
The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
Have you tried high-CRI LEDs? I find that they are much closer to the incandescent lighting feel.
I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background.
If I could get books inverted, I would.
If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black.
A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.
> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black.
Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you).
Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
My mirror disagrees.
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
The retina can't tell the difference between reflected light and emitted light
Unless you're in the habit of reading your books with a flashlight, the context makes it very different.
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”
The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?
I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.
If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.
When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
I use pure 000000 and FFFFFF on an OLED monitor, contrast is fantastic. I agree though on general lackluster gray-based dark modes, they can be worse to read.
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?
Yes, I do!
I also see the horizontal lines.
I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...
I definitely feel that during the day but have the inverse experience when the sun has set (light mode feels unbearable after dark).
I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me.
I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.
Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?
Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them?
(Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were…
Things people born after Macintosh say.
True. This was how my first computer was [1]
I didn’t call it dark mode though!
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1].
Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.
This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.
Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.
If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
Yep the first OS I (the author) used was the delightful beige of Windows 98
>> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were…
>Things people born after Macintosh say.
Things people born after teleprompters say.
Exactamundo.
For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred.
Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even.
If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white)
The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen.
I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`
Yes! And the designs themselves are being constrained to aesthetics that can look pretty good in light or dark mode.
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.)
There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.
I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
I wonder how much brighter (nits) screens have become over the same period as well.
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.
Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:
- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.
- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.
If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt.
It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.
There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode
A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds.
And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
> A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI.
This could be correct if astigmatism was rare.[1]
[1] https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way.
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
The root cause may just be the increase in dead space caused by mobile first UIs.
No.
The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.
Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
> but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
Not really anymore these days, because most use OLED, miniLED, or sufficiently good LCD tech that backlight bleed is not much of an issue.
> So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
>Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
You know what sucks? They do. Desktops do. They have since the late 90s.
Microsoft just never implemented it. Most desktop displays happily respond to brightness commands from the OS over DDCCI.
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.
The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?
Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?
Flanderization?
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!"
Meanwhile:
- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application
- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.
- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.
I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters..
QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it. #000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark.
Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
> improve legibility
Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not. (Update: it became black again)
There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
They did not claim not enough contrast is impossible.
This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.
In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".
Also shown on the chart, to a smaller degree. And more noticeable on mobile probably where there's lots of OLEDs and concern about battery usage.
I suspect the trend would be even more extreme if multiplied by typical screen brightness over time!
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.
That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps.
Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."
> people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better
Astigmatism is very common.