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Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#51

Post by falcolas »

_bxg1 wrote: post #8

> HN should be dark mode by default A less controversial solution would be to simply hook into the user's system-level light/dark setting: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... That said, I've wanted this feature desperately for a long time. Browsing HN on my desktop monitor in the evening is blinding and gives me a headache. I find myself resizing the window to be phone-sized just so my eye…

I have to say - if your monitor is blinding you, you have it set to too high a brightness. You're doing yourself a disservice by not turning it down. It should only throw out as much light as a piece of pristine printer paper in the same orientation.

In the middle of the day my monitor tops out at about 30 of 100, and in the evenings I will occasionally turn it down to about 5 or 10. Many modern monitors will offer an option to save multiple settings, or they at least make brightness a top level configuration setting.

EDIT: Is saying "If your monitor is hurting your eyes, turn it down," really such a controversial statement?

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#52

Post by mkl »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #35

In terms of small items that would make HN better, would it be possible make the collapse/expand buttons larger on mobile? Because the site is so simple, it already works really well on mobile. But these tiny little buttons ruin the experience for me, and I'm sure others.

I would love a way to collapse the parent of a comment (or all it's children) without having to scroll up and find it by carefully tracking indentation. Some sites do this by drawing the tree of comments directly with vertical lines going down beside siblings, which can be clicked to collapse. That's a much bigger target.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#53

Post by dang »

kazinator wrote: post #45
dang wrote: post #32

Ok, you guys, this isn't the first time we've heard this request ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). I'm willing to do it (edit: not to change the default! just to add the option). It's just that any CSS issue that goes more than a quarter-inch deep is outside both my expertise and my interest. We can add CSS to https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css for prefers-color-scheme: dark , bu…

Right now, the profile has a single property "topcolor" where you can slightly customize HN. It seems that this could easily be extended with a few more similar properties, suitable values of which could produce a darkmode.

I'd love to do that just by offering people a CSS blob that we could inject into their CSS when they browse HN. Our original idea (actually kogir's idea from back in 2014—he's a forward-thinking guy) was that people could create skins this way, if that Winamp-era term isn't too obsolete by now, and share them.

However, someone who is plugged into Reddit told me that they used to allow user-defined CSS for customizing subreddits and had to roll it back because of security issues. They built an entire customization UI instead. That scared me off the idea.

My fear with a customization UI—the HN equivalent of which would be profile settings, as you indicate—is that it would get way too complicated too quickly. How many additional settings would we need?

If someone can define a not-too-complicated set of profile settings which, when filled in to taste, would solve people's dark-mode concerns, I'm all for it. We could even make a separate editor page for it and link to that from the profile. The other constraint is: for each setting, the input format would need to be simple to sanitize (e.g. 'valid hex color'). Otherwise we just create the security issue all over again, only with a shitty nonstandard application-level CSS editor instead of standard CSS.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#54

Post by accelbred »

fao_ wrote: post #23
Zekio wrote: post #4

If you use Firefox you can use the addon Dark Reader, so you can get dark mode for every site if you want at night

Dark Reader adds a good 5 seconds of lag to interacting with the web (including: website loading, website interaction, tab switching) for me.

That's why I use "Dark Background and Light Text". Color schemes are not as good as Dark Reader, but it doesn't noticeably affect performance.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#56

Post by jimmyswimmy »

dang wrote: post #32

Ok, you guys, this isn't the first time we've heard this request ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). I'm willing to do it (edit: not to change the default! just to add the option). It's just that any CSS issue that goes more than a quarter-inch deep is outside both my expertise and my interest. We can add CSS to https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css for prefers-color-scheme: dark , bu…

Please, for God's sake, don't screw it up. I can keep up with news on this site from a 15 kb/s shared satellite link when I'm out at sea. Except perhaps for the really big threads. I love the simple interface. It's text, it's simple, it's readable, and when I hit the spacebar, it scrolls down a page. No fancy fonts, no javascript, no nothing. I love HN for its simplicity and speed. Thanks for maintaining a good engineering philosophy.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#57

Post by _bxg1 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #42
lowdose wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be an idea to open a github repo for this and let the community contribute their efforts there?

Looking forward to the pull request finally modernising HN into a React SPA

It's possible not everyone will realize this is /s :)

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#58

Post by [deleted] »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #35

In terms of small items that would make HN better, would it be possible make the collapse/expand buttons larger on mobile? Because the site is so simple, it already works really well on mobile. But these tiny little buttons ruin the experience for me, and I'm sure others.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#60

Post by dang »

mkl wrote: post #52
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #35

In terms of small items that would make HN better, would it be possible make the collapse/expand buttons larger on mobile? Because the site is so simple, it already works really well on mobile. But these tiny little buttons ruin the experience for me, and I'm sure others.

I would love a way to collapse the parent of a comment (or all it's children) without having to scroll up and find it by carefully tracking indentation. Some sites do this by drawing the tree of comments directly with vertical lines going down beside siblings, which can be clicked to collapse. That's a much bigger target.

I agree that navigation is an issue, especially with large threads. From my perspective it's strictly a UI question. I don't want to spoil HN's minimalism.

I've been thinking of experimenting with links in the comment line (the same place that the timestamp and "[-]" appear) which say things like "up" (to go to parent) and "next" to go to next sibling.

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