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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?

#61

Post by falcolas »

I wouldn't vote against the existence of a dark mode - why not make it an option - but I strongly vote against making it default. If your monitor is throwing out so much light that you're getting eye strain, you need to turn down the brightness of your monitor or phone screen.

For myself, most of the time my monitors are set to a maximum of around 30 on a scale of 100, and I don't get any eyestrain. Dark mode with a properly calibrated monitor, in contrast, does give me eye strain - the light letters on the dark background don't play well with my Keratoconus.

Right now, with HN defaults, at around 7pm, the brightness is 15, and contrast is 30.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#63

Post by _bxg1 »

falcolas wrote: post #51
_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 a…

I like having my display as bright as possible without it being uncomfortable; it helps with readability. On my laptop and phone I'll shift the brightness throughout the day to meet this heuristic, but alas, Windows does not make this trivial with an external monitor. Usually you have to fiddle with the monitor's physical buttons and navigate down into a menu. So I just don't bother.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#64

Post by falcolas »

_bxg1 wrote: post #63
falcolas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I like having my display as bright as possible without it being uncomfortable; it helps with readability. On my laptop and phone I'll shift the brightness throughout the day to meet this heuristic, but alas, Windows does not make this trivial with an external monitor. Usually you have to fiddle with the monitor's physical buttons and navigate down into a menu. So I just don't bother.

But if you're getting eyestrain, it's by definition uncomfortable, and worth the 10 seconds or so to navigate the said menus.

Not everything has a dark mode available, so make sure that the worst case is tolerable.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#65

Post by krapp »

dang wrote: post #53
kazinator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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

I posted a possible solution in another comment here[0]. You would have to write a separate dark theme, and there would be a single option to select it in the user panel. The data is literally just an integer pointing to an index in a whitelist of css filenames, and any errors would default to displaying the existing stylesheet.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198711

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#66

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

Anyone who wants to make a suggestion is welcome to.

I'm not a programmer, so I'm probably saying something incredibly, fantastically stupid. Take this in the spirit of "Brainstorming" where you say even the stupid stuff because that sometimes leads to good things.

I am not a programmer, but I do know some HTML and CSS and studied it a bit and Blogger (aka Blogspot) let's you dig in the code of the theme if you want, but it also has a user-friendly section where you can change colors and stuff and it let's you "add CSS" there and I do add CSS snippets there to tweak my websites.

I have tried digging in the code a few times. It's never worked for me. But adding CSS snippets is something I can handle.

You already have a feature to select your top bar color. Would it be feasible to expand that feature a little to let people select dark mode colors? (Ie to change more colors than just the top bar.)

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#67

Post by toupeira »

dang wrote: post #53
kazinator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reddit's user CSS was different, mods could edit it on subreddits and all visitors would receive it. On HN you'd only get the CSS you've set yourself, so there shouldn't really be a security concern (except for CSRF attacks against the settings form I guess).

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#68

Post by aaomidi »

jimmyswimmy wrote: post #56
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 engin…

Completely agree with you

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#69

Post by dang »

jimmyswimmy wrote: post #56
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 engin…

I'm on board with ceasing and desisting from screwing it up.

Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

#70

Post by ldd »

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…

minimal CSS to add (nothing to remove):

https://pastebin.com/4JYbSi5F

[edit]: fixed, shorter version: https://pastebin.com/dT4KKt3s

[edit 2: fixed textarea, dead links: https://pastebin.com/CKy4HQXE ]

[edit 3: added a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Ont553x ]

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