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Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

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Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#351

Post by coffeeling »

adql wrote: post #275
mcv wrote: post #237

I think the issue is a lot more subtle than simply "dark mode = better" vs "light mode = better". When it's dark around me, I don't want a bright white screen blinding me, so I prefer dark mode. But when I'm in a well-light room with a white wall behind my screen, I don't want to have to peer at a dark rectangle. Also, whether you're using dark or light mode, contrast and brightness need to be set right, and I think…

Many dark mode themes also aren't great. With bright mode you can get away with #000 on #fff but, at very least for me, just reversing that doesn't work all that well, I prefer at the very least background to be in #111-#222 range and maybe text not be in #fff but a bit lower. On other side some dark themes have pretty terrible contrast, but that happens with white too, like HN just deciding light gray on light gray…

Many light themes also increasingly suck, because they're just dark themes dunked in a can of white paint.

Before the dark mode fad took off, people used to just do UI design and make interfaces that were just that - interfaces. They weren't attempting to be obsessively light or dark, so we got a wide variety of things in app UIs and the UIs didn't shy away from borderlines, shadows, color, darker elements in an otherwise not very dark UI, etc.

Then dark mode happened, and everyone wanted to design dark mode things. Dark mode makes small contrasts more legible (IME) and makes colors really, really pop. So you can easily design very flat UIs without anything in the way of borders, and small bits of color are really dramatic and eye catching.

Not-dark colorscapes feel really different - small contrast differences aren't as salient, you can use dark elements in the UI without disrupting it much. Borderlines and drop shadows look great, really high contrast for text just feels nice. Color is a much more balanced part of the whole, so you can use it much more liberally and it'll just feel nice and balanced.

But those are not the UIs we get today. Humans love to categorize things, and they like pairs of opposites a lot. If we have a specific dark theme, well, what do we call the other one? Light theme, of course. And in a disastrous display of nominative determinism, that's exactly what we've gotten afterwards: Designers have intentionally started making UIs that are actively light, and those are not designed specifically - most are just slapping white paint on the existing flat dark theme, or otherwise obey those same design sensibilities with light grays on white and minimal use of color.

Why would anyone want to use light themes if they constantly get designed wrong? The proper contrast people should be working with isn't light and dark theme or white and black theme, but colorful and intentionally dark.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#352

Post by coffeeling »

daveoc64 wrote: post #238
wwalexander wrote: post #235

I don't understand how this debate has become about which mode is biologically the most optimal for legibility. The obvious, clear benefit of dark mode is that there's less light, which feels more comfortable to many, many people. I'm curious, how many of my fellow dark-mode users also struggle with migraine headaches? Perhaps this and other light-sensitivity afflictions can explain why dark mode seems to be so conte…

It's because there's a common trope online that people say seeing something in light mode is "blinding" or "makes my eyes bleed". I think it's therefore important that the actual benefits of dark mode are tested scientifically and not just assumed.

They're not really wrong - I use light themes but occasionally experiment with dark ones and though both transitions can be jarring, the dark->light one is easily worse. The issue is that the shock is temporary, and long term using light themes avoids the "flashbang" issue of mixing light/dark colorscapes.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#353

Post by notfed »

nu11ptr wrote: post #121

It seems likely the author was just into it because it is a fad. Here is why I use and like dark mode: My eyes feel better on both short term and long term use. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable on my eyes. Whether or not it is technically more readable or not doesn't matter to me. I don't need a study of a population to know what feels better to me. I'm a sample size of one, but the only one in this case that matters…

+1

Mine and your subjective experience of feeling pain/discomfort from lighter screens can never be disproven by science, so a sample size of 1 is all that is needed.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#354

Post by coffeeling »

suprjami wrote: post #248

I've read a couple of other posts about this (below) so I finally decided to give light mode a try for a week. I've switched to all Solarized Light terminal/editor/Firefox/GTK and turned off dark mode in the websites where that's a setting. https://stitcher.io/blog/why-light-themes-are-better-accordi... https://medium.com/codesphere-cloud/should-you-really-be-cod...

Funny, I can't stand Solaris and usually want more contrast. Most light themes for code editors follow a low contrast uniform hue approach and I just don't jive with that.

I've ended up liking Visual Studio Blue a lot for VSCode:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanijelM...

Then again, I think most new light themes are just designed wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33961645

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#355

Post by midoridensha »

scatters wrote: post #295
midoridensha wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Finally, I could read and write code and documents the way I thought they were intended to be viewed- dark text on a light background, mimicking real-world books and papers. Real-world paper doesn't have a backlight behind it, projecting bright white light directly into your eyes. If you want to see documents the way they were "intended" to be viewed, you need to use an e-ink screen.

Why should your eyes care whether the light was generated behind the screen or bounced off it? Photons are photons.

Because directly-transmitted light from an LCD screen's backlight doesn't scatter the way diffuse, reflected light from a piece of paper does. It's like comparing a laser to a flashlight.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#356

Post by aaronbrethorst »

wpietri wrote: post #328
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My whole house is full of warm Hue bulbs. The handful of Hue lights that are color temperature-adjustable are all set to warm because blue-tinted lights drive me nuts. That said, I use Wirecutter's budget SAD lamp pick set to the bluest setting and maximum brightness for about 20 minutes per day to help me cope with this particularly gloomy Seattle season, and it definitely seems to help. So you may not need to rewir…

Oh, interesting! Thanks for sharing your experience. YMMV, but something I discovered is that light colors bother me when they're out of sync with my day-night rhythms. So mine start very warm in color, very gradually shift to pretty cool color temperatures as we approach noon, and then get warmer again into the evening. My theory is that this gets me what the SAD lights are simulating without any manual effort, and…

Yeah, I've thought about trying the Adaptive Lighting feature, as Apple calls it in the Home app with my compatible Hue lights, but only a small fraction of my Hue lights support changing color temperature, and having a mish-mash of blue and yellow lights scattered around my house just makes me angry :)

If/when I ever have reason to redo all of the lights in my house, I'll definitely go with all bulbs that support at least different color temperatures if not a full range of colors and give this a whirl.

My theory is that this gets me what the SAD lights are simulating without any manual effort, and it seems to be working

Very interesting...

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#357

Post by ngcc_hk »

Sadly no conclusion in the discussion here, other than many different opinions. It is important and I feel good to read in dark mode. But really want to nail it.

Did try to get yellow light e-ink but not as nice as reading on ipad.

Continue to struggle then.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#358

Post by YVoyiatzis »

Some people, self included, may find that dark mode is easier on their eyes because it reduces the amount of blue light that is emitted by the screen. Blue light can cause eye strain and fatigue, so reducing the amount of blue light can help to make your screen more comfortable to look at.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#359

Post by deafpolygon »

I prefer light mode most of the time, but where I am sitting is dark enough, often enough - that I need to switch off to mostly-dark mode. I'll keep whatever I am reading in a lowered brightness.

DARK READER extension for Firefox (and other browser) have a mode for both. You can set light mode with lowered brightness - white stays white, but is much less glaring.

Another anecdata key factor here is - too many people have their fonts set too small, myself included. I find that when I turn up the font sizes, my eye strains far less irrespective of my dark/light mode settings.

Re: Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes? (2020)

#360

Post by int_19h »

comfypotato wrote: post #345
causi wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moon casts blue light. Moonlight is not blue. In fact it is more red than sunlight. https://i.stack.imgur.com/72dkh.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/4wtWq.gif

The comment you’re responding to is nonsense. They clearly don’t suffer from severe insomnia. Dark modes have been a godsend for me when it comes to falling asleep. There’s no doubt that the stimulation from something like TikTok as opposed to reading a Gutenberg ebook has more to do with the content than the light emitting from your phone. The notion, however, that the light of the phone (or other screen) has nothin…

I suffer from severe insomnia. For quite a long time, I've used blue light filters and automatic dimmers on all my devices with screens. A few months ago, when I discovered that there are no studies that clearly confirm the benefits of those things, I decided to stop using them to see for myself.

So far, there is no observable difference. Now, I'm not going to claim that this is therefore obviously the case for everybody else. But, at the very least, it's not universally a "godsend".

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