If I encounter a page that's dark mode (GUI), after about a minute or so, I start seeing spots before my eyes that stay with me for quite a while.
To wit... I use these two firefox extensions to convert pages from Dark Mode to Light mode. If one fails, the other usually finds success (I think they work in reverse too):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-color/
side note: I cannot explain why the terminal (FG/White; BG/Black) feels incredibly comfortable to my eyes. Maybe it's the larger font I use (80 columns = ~2/3rds of my 16" screen width), the right amount of contrast, the fixed spacing...?
And the content on the screen felt like real-world tangible object.
Having said that, I feel that dark mode (full dark) is a product of "new is exciting", "game theme", "dark means serious, mystery, suspense", "no glaring", "linux/console style, so geek", "we are coders, so different from normal people" etc
The reality is, full dark theme requires more brightness and more power consumption. It feels like searching for things in a dark room without light (mystery, suspense factor). Light theme can feel more relaxed, with lower brightness settings.
So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).
So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.
With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.
With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.
If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.
I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.
Can’t turn down the minimum brightness.
Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user, not something a third party can control and dicatate. There used to be no concept of dark or light "mode", every person configured their UI colors as they wished. Want green on pink mode? No problem, just configure it.
(But to answer the question, definitely "light mode" for me. A predominantly dark screen brings on a headache quickly.)
This was true when we had powerful computers (Apollo) with plenty of RAM (4MB) running complex multitasking distributed systems. On today's hardware, such things are impossible. /s
My entire OS, most apps and 90% of websites switch automatically with a single keyboard shortcut.
With such an extensive time study, highly unlikely to be usurped any time soon, and the result being quite the opposite of what I set out to prove, we can all safely put this debate to rest.
A contributing factor is my keratoconus has had some kind of remission. Which is a good thing. At one point I had so many focal points in both eyes, without corrective lenses and before surgery, more than a dozen overlapping versions of text produced unreadable spaghetti. Unless it was a very tiny font from a distance, and then the glyphs only partially occluded each other, and I could I decode them.
Looking at one of those small bright electronics power LED dots across a dark room, I could see all my focal points in each eye, and focal webs meandering between them.
So I feel quite privileged to be able to use dark mode with unaided eyes now.
Edit: I underwent LASIK eye surgery, and I don't recall experiencing headaches beforehand. Or maybe, just getting old?
I’m just happy that the mode switch is well supported across OSes and browsers nowadays, though it does add some complexity to theming web apps.
Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.
Staring into a light source that contrasts enough with the ambient light to contract my pupils is uncomfortable. I don't want to do that even if it makes me read faster.
Eg from physical differences or other issues with their eyes, differences in the way their brains process vision information, to nothing more than cultural habits (it's what they're used to).
These differences show up knowingly or not as preference towards either dark or light mode or something in-between.
So it's reasonable to default to eg light mode since that might be suitable for the largest cohort, but ideally it's best to have the option to switch to dark for those that prefer it.
Historically, printing black text on white paper was presumably technically easier or cheaper, but I doubt this makes much difference for modern printing of the last fifty years or so.
Edit:
Thinking about it, it's clear that dark mode is most pleasant in dark environments, because it reduces the contrast between the screen and the environment. However, books, being reflective rather than emissive, don't work in dark environments at all. Which defeats the main use case of dark mode.
Moreover, since books are reflective, there is no risk that they get brighter than the environment, while this risk exists with light mode on screens with a brightness level set too high.
If you have never tried reading a book under direct midday sunlight, you should try it sometime. It's quite unpleasant.
That doesn't make a difference as long as the light has the same brightness.
> If you have never tried reading a book under direct midday sunlight, you should try it sometime. It's quite unpleasant.
Despite the fact that books don't emit light straight into our eyes? And apart from this, wouldn't that mean we need in fact dark mode books? So why don't they exist?
Thinking about it, your eyes, not using a monitor, will adjust naturally be be ok with seeing light to dark objects around you so it makes sense for the screen brightness to be in that range. I think probably people who get headaches from white screens have it brighter than that range. I mean people don't generally get issues from white paint on walls and the like.
Dark mode at high brightness and light mode at any brightness on LED screens both give me migraines.
That said, light mode on non-emissive (e-ink, actual paper) is find.
When people talk about light mode blinding them, please do yourself a favour and do not live like a goblin. Work in a well lit room and calibrate your monitor, your eyes should not be hurting looking at bright colors.
Books, websites, email on light background. Code (lots of low density lines with only brackets) on a black background.
! dark mode
news.ycombinator.com##html:matches-media((prefers-color-scheme: dark)):style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg))Both on iPhone and Mac.
night → dark mode with high brightness ⇒ less eye strain
Seriously, the best UIs let users adjust things to their preferences instead of forcing one or two-polar-opposite choices.