I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.

Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"

Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level

Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.

Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.

I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.

The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.

For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.

During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.

The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.

I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.

If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.

Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.

No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.

"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."

Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.

Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.

When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.

So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to

1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.

2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.

3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.

It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.

I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.

   > I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today.

It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers.

It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.

>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background.

If I could get books inverted, I would.

Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account.

I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.

The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.

If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black.

A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.

> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black.

Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.

> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume

Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.