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.
> 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 its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.
During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.
The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
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'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.
Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"
Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
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.
> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume
Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.
I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.
If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.
Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
> 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.
There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum.
Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design…
Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness.
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.
Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account.
I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.
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.
I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.
The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.
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.
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...
The only time I preferred light mode was as when I was on vacation in Florida and worked out of a sun room. I find myself normally working in low light environments which makes dark mode better overall. But it doesn’t have to be black background in fact I like the other “dark themes” that are darker shades of blue
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.)
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.
i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).
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.
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, or the other way around in dark 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 think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse.
As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc.
Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut.
I think it's a mental trap.
Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
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.
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)`
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.
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.
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?
My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this).
However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night.
I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark.
In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it;
1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT.
2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`
3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK
If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
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.
Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white.
The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
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.
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.
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 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.
Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS design to go back to it would probably be Yosemite. I don’t have any nostalgia for skeuomorphic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flattened design and blur effects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a substantial jump in brightness from previous versions.
Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite.
Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua.
This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best.
Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic.
P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.
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.
i let my devices attempt to enforce this. Windows goes one further by automatically dimming my displays at a set time (it defaults to like 19:00 or 20:00). I wish my phone did this too, but i haven't found a way to have it do dim and undim automatically.
anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.
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".
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.
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 play helldivers 2 on an HDR monitor and i nearly always balk at playing daytime missions because the in game light source "sun" literally hurts my eyes to look at.
However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.
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.
piskov|1 month ago
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
—
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.
itopaloglu83|1 month ago
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.
cosmic_cheese|1 month ago
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.
topspin|1 month ago
I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.
During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.
The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
Quothling|1 month ago
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
godelski|1 month ago
Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"
Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
VerifiedReports|1 month ago
"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.
taneq|1 month ago
Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.
barrell|1 month ago
If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.
Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
Krutonium|1 month ago
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.
doodlesdev|1 month ago
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.
port11|1 month ago
Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design…
Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness.
Example meta reviews:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/
152334H|1 month ago
Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today.
It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers.
It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.
Normal_gaussian|1 month ago
illiac786|1 month ago
I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.
Kerrick|1 month ago
Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
nitwit005|1 month ago
A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.
troupo|1 month ago
Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
pshirshov|1 month ago
imwally|1 month ago
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.
greggsy|1 month ago
The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.
al_borland|1 month 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.
jcovik|1 month ago
netsharc|1 month ago
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...
qudat|1 month ago
culi|1 month ago
I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
efilife|1 month ago
soruly|1 month ago
3rodents|1 month ago
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.
csense|1 month ago
(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.)
culi|1 month ago
AlienRobot|1 month ago
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.
genewitch|1 month ago
CharlesW|1 month ago
Things people born after Macintosh say.
louthy|1 month ago
I didn’t call it dark mode though!
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
csense|1 month ago
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...
AlienRobot|1 month ago
>Things people born after Macintosh say.
Things people born after teleprompters say.
willhbr|1 month ago
jonstewart|1 month ago
satvikpendem|1 month ago
kccqzy|1 month ago
layer8|1 month ago
eek2121|1 month ago
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. ;)
rendaw|1 month ago
As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc.
Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut.
I think it's a mental trap.
Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
jedbrooke|1 month ago
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.
culi|1 month ago
coffeefirst|1 month ago
temp0826|1 month ago
exmadscientist|1 month ago
paulnpace|1 month ago
taneq|1 month ago
Doches|1 month ago
findthewords|1 month ago
AlienRobot|1 month ago
Brajeshwar|1 month ago
However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night.
I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark.
In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it;
1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT.
2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`
3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK
If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
chr15m|1 month ago
kmeisthax|1 month ago
The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
orbital-decay|1 month ago
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.
rented_mule|1 month ago
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.
quotemstr|1 month ago
pmontra|1 month ago
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.
wasmperson|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
ranger207|1 month ago
kevin_thibedeau|1 month ago
qball|1 month ago
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.
zerocrates|1 month ago
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.
amluto|1 month ago
But also:
> What I’ve graphed here is just the brightness of the window chrome, which isn’t really representative of the actual total screen brightness.
No kidding. Also, Mac OS keeps changing the chrome, and this isn’t obviously a very useful measurement.
h1fra|1 month ago
420official|1 month ago
joe_the_user|1 month ago
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
Wowfunhappy|1 month ago
Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite.
Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua.
This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best.
Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic.
P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.
findthewords|1 month ago
Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
piskov|1 month ago
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.
adius|1 month ago
To me, this seems like the obvious way to decide when to use dark mode, but apparently I’m in a very small minority.
genewitch|1 month ago
anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.
jsheard|1 month ago
zerocrates|1 month ago
itopaloglu83|1 month ago
walterbell|1 month ago
whizzter|1 month ago
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.
mberning|1 month ago
levocardia|1 month ago
genewitch|1 month ago
However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.
throwuxiytayq|1 month ago
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.
lukeinator42|1 month ago
krackers|1 month ago
pseudalopex|1 month ago
Astigmatism is very common.