I think we should try to avoid "upvote if you agree" type of posts (especially feature requests).
This call to action is too direct and it's too difficult to argue against it or retract the vote. In my opinion a better submission would be something that encourages discussion, like: "Do you think HN should add support for dark mode?"
Customizability of the web is a pet peeve of mine. And I wonder if selecting the color of text and background should really be a function of the website that the text is on.
There is no technical reason why not everybody should be able to set the color for any website any way they want.
I would expect it to be trivial to make a bookmarklet that changes the color of HN. Here is a quick hack that makes HN display green text on black:
Just edit any of your existing bookmarks and put that line into the url field. Now whenever you click that bookmark, the current page turns into green text on black background.
>And I wonder if selecting the color of text and background should really be a function of the website that the text is on.
Websites, are intended to be an expression of their authors, and part of that intent is creative, including layout, color scheme and typography. Why shouldn't an author have control over the colors of their site?
>There is no technical reason why not everybody should be able to set the color for any website any way they want.
No technical reason, and plenty of plugins exist to enable that, and browsers have supported it to some degree for a while.
But modern websites are incredibly complex, and css can be dynamic. It would be an incredible burden to have everyone design a custom stylesheet for every site they visit from the ground up. The vast majority haven't got the time, talent or desire to do so, which is why it exists as an option, not the default.
Stop reading in the dark. It's not good for your eyes. The human eye has evolved over millions of years to work optimally in an environment where it is flooded with light (leaning blue).
I prefer dark mode, and I code, read etc in a room well-lit by daylight. I find it to be easier on my eyes, and the contrast of white-on-black just seems to work better for me. Not sure if it's related, but I'm colour blind.
Dark mode isn't for everyone, but it does seem to suit a lot of people - enough that 3rd party themes pop up for popular websites and desktop apps.
The human eye also has evolved to adapt to different lighting conditions, so if you are in the dark for a while, it will get more sensitive to light. This is what dark modes fix.
Enjoy your perfect vision while you can. For some of us with broken eyes it isn't so easy. Most dark modes cause far less bloom for me. I use 3rd party extensions to adjust colours and contrast, but they often don't produce good results for complex pages.
Even though it's important to point that out it is rather unrealistic for some parts of the population to completely restrict reading in the dark and makes no argument against an optional solution that would mitigate some of the downsides when it occurs
While a parachute is helpful in certain situations it's better not to fall out of the sky to begin with. It is, so to say, a poor workaround for the real problem.
It's not the light that bothers me it's only the blue component. Dark mode does help a lot. All my ides/editors are dark mode (except xcode but I rarely do iOS) where I spent most of my time.
There is a big difference between a monitor that is off and a monitor that on, but every pixel is set to black. The latter gives off enough light -- particularly blue light -- that I definitely would get worse sleep if it were near my head. (This applies to monitors with backlights -- OLED and probably plasma monitors are a different story.)
One way to reduce the amount of blue light coming into the eye, it seems to me, is to add red light, which causes the pupils to contract, which makes it so that less of the blue light outside the eye will enter the eye.
I get the impression that the light coming from a black pixel has a lot of blue in it, and that turning on the red sub-pixel would decrease the amount of blue light entering the eye because the pupil-contracting effect I just described (even though it would not decrease the amount of blue light outside the eye).
My point is that using f.lux to dial down the color temperature as low as it will go (1200 K on my Mac after bedtime, giving the screen a pronounced reddish-orange hue) will result in less blue light entering the eye than making most of the pixels black would result in.
(Turning on a red light bulb would have the same effect, but f.lux is easier.)
A better way to avoid blue light would be to switch to an OLED display or to have a backlight that can be switched to producing only red light, but among the no-purchase-cost options, if the only displays available are LCDs with standard white backlight, making the screen mostly red seems to work better than making the screen mostly black.
(Neither is particularly good however if the goal is to avoid the effects of blue light on the brain.)
I don't know which colors are most effective at causing the pupils to contract. I don't have any hard data. But I'm sensitive enough to the effects of blue light on my brain at night that I believe it worthwhile to post here my subjective impressions of the relative effectiveness of f.lux adjusted (via its preferences pane) as red as it will go and a mostly black screen, which I achieved by making most things white, including a solid-white desktop, then "inverting the colors" using the keyboard shortcut control-option-command-8.
(It is possible to have both of the "interventions" or "settings" described above in effect at the same time, so I will add that once f.lux is as red as it will go, "inverting the colors" does not produce any additional benefit as far as I can tell.)
Good explanations. Note that often backlit LCDs do have settings for R, G, B drive levels which can be adjusted similarly to what f.lux would do, but without the timed functions. I have used that in the past to switch between 'normal' and 'user' reduced blue modes.
Here's an idea. I remember using some flakey DVI cables where one of the colours would drop out. How about making an HDMI-HDMI adapter that doesn't transmit blue? Even better make it a splitter where one has blue and one doesn't and feed them both into inputs of the same display.
I tried Darkreader (along with a basically all the other dark theme addons available on AMO) and found those "hangs" really annoying.
The one I've been using is this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou.... It doesn't hang, works on pretty much any site and has customizable colors.
The desktop experience is great. I gave up on the app due to freezes/crashes on iOS 12. In a hunt for alternatives, found this app, which is more than comparable.
That's what I use since forever. Can recommend. Be sure to edit settings to your liking also.
Edit: I was going to edit the post to include a link to the Android app I use (that mostly seems to embed the site), but it seems to have been removed from Play store. No idea why, works fine on my phone.
Oops! I googled Stylus to see if it was a Stylish alternative, and the first result was Stylish, so I assumed it was a typo. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t look into it further.
There're plenty of browser extensions for this which also prevent the problem you get when eventually you have to switch to a different site that doesn't have a dark mode (like 99% of the sites on the web). I use Midnight Lizard.
As a Midnight Lizard developer I'm doing my best to make sure it is as secure as it can be, but it is harder to prove that you are not doing anything bad...
Doesn't every browser extension increase the attack surface a bit? It all comes down to your personal risk/reward profile. I can't live without an adblocker, a Vim emulator and a dark theme in my browser, but I don't use anything else.
Although I like dark mode, I don't use it. Because the web is by default white.
Suppose I am using dark text editor and the websites I often visit are dark. Still every few minutes I will have to visit a site with white background. My eyes will have to constantly adjust between dark and light backgrounds. It can't be escaped.
I don't understand why developers use dark text editors when the sites they are building are white. They visit that every few seconds.
I added it as a toggle-able script for TamperMonkey so I don't have to click on the bookmarklet on every page, and changed the 'invert(1)' bit to invert(.9) so it's not full black.
This should would be very easy to implement using the existing settings paradigm. For everyone recommending browser extensions, compromising the security of my browser so I can read HN (or any other site) better is not an option. See the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447816
I can never understand why a simple colour scheme is presented as a "big thing". Consistent dark mode themes seems so unattainable in modern software (in fact any theme customisation).
It is as necessary as cars with different colours. People's preference.
So let stop making a big deal about it, and just have it in all software. Its just a colour scheme! Stop being lazy software devs!
After using custom userstyles and the DarkReader extension in Chrome I tried leaving everything at its default bright theme and instead use a bluelight-filter at a very low color temperature (1900k). The result is still very ergonomic and I don't have to worry about slight theming errors like dark text on dark backgrounds anymore.
Normally that combination switches between windows within the same app. How do you handle that if you have it remapped? It's perhaps one of my most-used key combinations on macOS.
Context: On macOS, the equivalent of Alt + Tab is ⌘Tab. However, unlike on Windows, ⌘Tab only switches between apps--it won't iterate over multiple windows within an app. That has a separate combination: ⌘`. So if you want to switch to a particular window within an app, first you have to ⌘Tab to the app, then ⌘` to the correct window.
Midnight Lizard extension uses similar trick:
`brightness(0.9) hue-rotate(180deg) invert(1) brightness(0.9)`
This way resulting colors will be at least similar to the original ones and contrast ratio is also better
The problem I'm having with these is that the need some time to load and apply. In the meantime, the default theme is used, which results in an unpleasant "flash".
Why are dark themes only just becoming popular? I've been using dark, low contrast themes for more than a decade now. It used to be a sign of a true geek. Why is it becoming mainstream now all of a sudden?
This call to action is too direct and it's too difficult to argue against it or retract the vote. In my opinion a better submission would be something that encourages discussion, like: "Do you think HN should add support for dark mode?"