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Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

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Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#311

Post by programbreeding »

powersnail wrote: post #98
aasasd wrote: post #76

Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…

That's true for me as well. I couldn't read the oven clock (blue on black) at just 10 feet away. Anything bright on a dark background is just a blurry radiation pattern. The reason dark-themed terminal and coding is fine, might be the monospace fonts. They are square-ish, so there is less need to find the edges accurately. They are also eligible on very cheap, trashy screens. As a side effect, code is readable in dar…

>I couldn't read the oven clock (blue on black) at just 10 feet away

I have good vision: no known issues, regular eye checkups, etc. But I find it nearly impossible to read most displays that use blue LEDs. If the background is blue (eg: timex indiglo watch) then it's fine. But blue leds on some of my home theater equipment drive me insane. Even if it isn't the letters/numbers themselves and it's just a regular circular power led, I find them really hard to look at.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#312

Post by lopis »

noir_lord wrote: post #281
aasasd wrote: post #76

Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…

I'm asytigmatic, light on dark is fine (and what I use everywhere) as long as it isn't #fff on #000 I'm OK so lots of my setup is quite light grey on dark grey. The thing that really makes a difference for me is screen resolution (or more accurately, pixels per inch) on a modern 27" 4K I have far far fewer issues than I had on a 1280x1024 17" LCD - part of that is improvements in brightness/contrast and the technolog…

I guess this explains why I hate OLED dark themes so much.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#313

Post by ketzu »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…

You are overstating the results of such studies or use your datapoint out of context. Just because A is on average better than B, does not mean that A is better for everyone.

If you have a study that shows that most people do(n't) like pineapple on pizza (maybe make a blog post "is pineapple on pizza such a good idea?"), that is rather unrelated to someone likeing pineapple on pizza or not and is not claiming that all people don't like pineapple on pizza.

Darkmode is a nice thing! It feels like some people hype it as the 'one true better solution to everything' or a strictly superior version, when it boils down to preferance and minor differences. In the end you probably want to have both options (if you have the capacity to support them).

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#314

Post by onli »

taneq wrote: post #292
yiyus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

> point the errors you find All of those studies are studies of how other people experienced dark mode vs. normal mode. All of my studies are studies of how I experience dark mode vs. normal mode. I feel that my sample more closely aligns to the population I'm trying to study. Also it mentions spectrum-shifting software like 'night light' or f.lux or whatever Android and Windows call it when they do this by default.…

It's easy to be wrong even about your own perception. You might think you like the dark mode because it strains your eyes less, but in reality you just like how it looks and you strain your eyes more, being more fatigued at the end of the day without even noticing. Or the other direction.

This whole "those studies are studies of how other people experienced X" is a typical argumentation scheme of esoteric fields like homeopathy, where science, logic and data is completely rejected and replaced with pure faith. Real studies can be criticized without relying on that trap.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#315

Post by qwerty456127 »

enay wrote: post #293
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish. The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a promine…

I wouldn't be surprised if the e-ink display market exploded in the near future with Dasung getting the refresh rate into usable territory and the availability of color e-ink. I been trying a couple of things to help with eye fatigue and the following helped me quite a bit: setting up "Breaks For Eyes" for osx to remind about taking breaks, switching to the light "Brutalist" theme for emacs and moving most of my long…

> getting the refresh rate into usable territory

Doesn't unnecessary refresh deterioration the e-ink display and diminish its power efficiency? I really see no reason for the display to refresh until the actual information you need to view changes. What do you need a higher refresh rate for? Wobbly window effects, smooth scrolling, verbose build output and intense action games?

I really don't want the screens to adapt by increasing refresh rates, I want the software to adapt by ditching scrolling for pagination, giving up unnecessary visual effects, decreasing verbosity (only displaying what I really want to see) etc.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#316

Post by roelschroeven »

dsego wrote: post #283
roelschroeven wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate I'm sorry, what? I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth. I can't stand…

That's because you're used to them, that's fine. Many of those actions can be done via key combos or other keys (esp on a Mac), like C+R to refresh, C+Sh+I for browser console or Enter to rename a file. Function keys at this point are certainly old school and could even be considered an atavism, like the Print Screen button or the numeric keypad.

Some functions have replacements, others don't. Just one example: both F5 and CTRL-R in browsers do a refresh; CTRL-F5 does a hard refresh (also renews the cache); I don't think there's a non-function-key alternative for that. Losing the function keys would be a major nuisance.

The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.

I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#317

Post by huffmsa »

> A dark blob on a light background is easier to see than the reverse

In the day perhaps. But a guy holding a flashlight at night is pretty damn visible.

Article doesn't cover it specifically, but I'd be interested to see how people perceive the ease of dark mode on OLED vs "dark mode" on LED.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#318

Post by rorykoehler »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #183
squarefoot wrote: post #85

"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?" Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in th…

I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have…

I'm in the market for an external display to be used for text/coding only, in portrait mode. An e-paper display would be ideal. A quick search just seems to show that these displays are only sold as modules and no one is selling a finished product unless you go for something completely over-featured (e.g. wacom tablet). Do you have any recommendations?

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#319

Post by mellosouls »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…

Whatever works for you, that's great. But your anecdotal preferences are hardly worth using as an argument against scientific research in general.

If we all dismissed science to serve our preferences and prejudices, we'd still be in the dark ages. No pun intended.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#320

Post by qwerty456127 »

esperent wrote: post #213
qwerty456127 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have…

My old Kobo Aura e-reader (gen 2 I think, amazing device) had a browser built-in. On one occasion I had to use it to log in and retrieve flight details when my phone battery died. That was probably my most frustrating tech experience of the last five years. Partly, the browser app was not great, but also because every single action required multiple 1-second long refreshes of the screen. Type a letter? Refresh. Scrol…

> Type a letter? Refresh. Scroll? Multiple refresh. Zoom? Multiple refresh. Select a button? Multiple refresh. Press the button?

That's because the damn smooth visual effects. Most of the transitions between these states are animated in a multiple number of frames. There would be no problem if it switched straight to the target state. Also scrolling should be replaced with pagination and zooming should ask you to enter the percentage rather than let you zoom visually.

> As you say, every app and website would need to be completely redesigned to work with e-paper.

I really wish every app to be designed that way anyway - that would mean less of pointless fun but much more of eye and brain comfort.

I don't know if there is a scientific paper on this but it feels like moving stuff depletes brain resources much faster, causing more stress and attention deficit.

The only thing I want displayed is what really needs to be displayed (exactly what I have came to view + some useful auxiliary information perhaps). The only thing to update at any given moment of time is what really needs to be updated.

As for smooth transition visual effects I have always hated them altogether and always disabled them on every PC I used.

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