> I've noticed that most techies do prefer dark mode, and I also recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls - I wonder if there's a correlation there.

If I may be mildly unflattering for a moment, I think it's just a trendiness thing. Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something.

If someone has real data showing it actually causes less eyestrain or something, I'm willing to change that opinion.

I'm sure everyone has their own specific reasons. And what you suggest might be true for a subset of individuals. For me, I prefer dark mode for a couple of sight related reasons:

- It makes my eye floaters much harder to notice

- Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones

> Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones

It was (and still is, but read on) for me until I realised that it was not light mode but backlight that was too strong. It was actually initially better with dark modes, low contrast stuff like zenburn, or (solarize light or dark) but only got worse later.

The moment I realised that was a backlight (and ambient light, including temperature) issue I moved back to light mode.

The above mentioned solutions have the nasty side effect that people usually increase backlight, which just makes things even worse!

I usually have the brightness on all my devices very low (10-20% typically, but have to go 100% if I’m outside and it’s particularly bright).

I also use f.lux/nightmode on all devices.

I usually have my phone at 0% brightness, but that I can still see something is a clear indication it's not actually 0%. The screen is still too bright for me if it's the only light source. Same for audio; I basically only switch between mute and minimum volume because everything above is too loud for me.

I hate that there's no way to acess more fine-grained levels below the arbitrarily imposed minimum. I realize most people would think their phone is broken if they could get it into a state where it doesn't produce any perceivable output despite not being explicitly off. I just wish there were some secret handshake I could use to confirm that I'm okay with having to find the brightness control while not being able to see anything; I already do that when I'm outside in the bright sun.

On my phone running iOS, in addition to the brightness slider there is an option under Settings -> General -> Accessibility Display Accommodations to "Reduce White Point", which I can use to further dim the screen.

I think this is nearly identical to using a dark theme; it doesn't actually reduce the brightness of the backlighting.

I have been wondering for a long time what determines the backlight minimum, why can't we go darker? Surely phones can be expected to be used in pitch black?

If you're on Android, you can use Dimmer to go below minimum brightness:

https://f-droid.org/app/giraffine.dimmer

Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like it renders a partially transparent overlay to simulate a lower brightness setting. The notification bar remains unaffected, but I guess it's better than nothing.

Yes. Beware of two things:

1. It can block "Install" button when installing apks from outside of Play Store. Disable it

2. Latest commit is 4 years ago. But I've still chosen it over Red Moon because it's more than 10x smaller (336kB but still very configurable).

My biggest problem with my Surface Go is the backlight doesn't go low enough. 100% is brighter than my phone goes and 0% is still feels like looking at 75% on my phone.

My phone is currently set to 10%

I just recently took the LSAT (now administered on Surface Go) and I saw test takers use the "High Contrast" mode in the software much more frequently than I expected.

Low backlight usually implies bad contrast. I hate this, especially with the modern trend for various shades of grey being used and thus being indistinguishable.

White backgrounds make for so much distraction when it comes to eye floaters for me as well.

For me it's nice when I can use a pure black background on an OLED screen and just have that much less light being produced beyond just turning down the brightness on a screen.

Came here to say the same thing- had eye surgery a few years back and the floaters are maddening. I've got a few apps that use a white background feels blinding whenever I have to use them.

same boat here -- migraine / cluster / photophobia sufferer and need to reduce as much as possible the volume and amplitude of light coming into my eye --

in truth, I don't think I'd be able to do my job at all without dark-mode text editors / terminals

Agree on the trend thing.

Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (DOS and UNIX). This applies to screens in well lit environments though, which would explain the rise of the dark mode in recent years: Smartphones in bed. But there it's more about the "less bad" solution.

The key part is having a well lit environment, so that the white background of the screen roughly matches the overall brightness of the surroundings. This way the pupils don't have to adjust all the time when looking around your room and then back at your screen, or when looking at code where the screen is mostly black with some text, and then some article with images.

I think the switch to black-on-white when GUIs first appeared was largely because the prototypical application was a word processor, where the selling point was that what you saw on the screen looked like what you were going to print on paper.

Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length units, but were usually based on some fixed notional dpi rather than matching the size on the physical screen).

I suspect it's more about high refresh rate CRTs. On low refresh rate, blocks of colour really were very unpleasant to look at, but this went away over about 70hz. Of course, this was never an issue on LCDs.

There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.

In netscape the default background colour used to be black on light grey. I find that much easier on my eyes than black on white. Even a light yellow with dark green text. But given a dark room I like to switch the other way. See how you feel with a terminal/editor in different colour schemes. So bright room, bright scheme, dark room dark scheme. What I can't stand is flipping between the two modes. At night on a phone, some apps are incredibly painful to read. Even darkish flavours can be ruined with bright splash screens. There's just no consistency here.

White light gives me headaches.

I also work through the dark hours the night. Switching between bright white terminal/app/ide to pitch black, as I do every night, is jarring and, again, gives me headaches. Dark mode should be an option just like every site should be accessible to any assistive technology.

Disagree. I work remotely so nobody ever sees my screen except for me. I prefer dark mode because it's more comfortable on my eyes.

I kinda like dark mode on darker days, but if I'm jumping from the IDE to a light webpage like this one every few seconds, then a light IDE is much better.

This is not true. If you are in a room at night with all the lights off and the only source of light is your computer screen, you want as little amount of light coming out of that screen as possible to reduce that contrast ratio between the computer screen and the ambient darkness. The only exception is res light due to the way the eye works. White backgrounds, which consist of all the red green and blue pixels, add more strain onto the eyes due to giving off more light. Given equal backlight, white backgrounds give off more light than black.

In fact the single greatest thing that computer manufacturers could do to improve the lives of night-time workers and people who use their computers with the lights off would be to switch to OLED screens, where the black pixels do not use backlight. As someone who studies human vision, I took special note of the improvement when I switched to a phone that uses an OLED screen in dark mode. There, with white on black text, the white text is the only thing in the room giving off light and it’s a drastic improvement.

However if the colors do not matter (you can deal with monochrome text and images), then using a true “red mode” will produce the least eye strain. Check out F.Lux’s “darkroom” color effect. You’ll feel the difference instantly. You’ll be able to comfortably see what’s on the screen in the dark with the screen as the only light source, as well as be able to quickly scan around the room without your eyes needing to adjust! You can even turn up the brightness much higher than you can without it.

It's a matter of practice. I find light backgrounds unbearable in thr nails on chalkboards sense. After looking at one the rest of the environment looks dark and off. I can't make the backlight dim enough for them to be comfortable. With dark backgrounds and light text, I feel the device to be a more natural part of the surroundings. It's not glowing nearly as much and is emitting only the light that's needed to communicate the information I need.

If you are talking about research based on modern oled devices then I'd love to read it. Maybe I'm weird.

> Dark mode objectively is more straining on the eyes

Can you substantiate this?

I'm another for dark mode. I've been doing it for years when it's been available and I switched my phone because my previous one didn't have it. Even with the backlight cranked all the way down it was physically painful to look at. Others have suggested turning up the lights, well you can't do this in vehicles driving at night. It's also difficult if you're sharing a room with someone. I suspect I may be outside the range of normal people as going outside without sunglasses isn't a pleasant experience for me and I've got added sensitivity due to chemo. I do happen to be night owl normally not sure if that really matters or correlates to anything. I don't have the same problem with books, just items with backlighting.

Came here to say a variation of this.

Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.

Maybe people who spend most of their working lives alone, staring at screens, are picking dark mode because it's comfortable, not cool. There is no one around to impress. It's ok if you don't get it, but that doesn't mean it's just a fad.

It's cool to be comfortable, and now easier. OLED screens invert the default behavior of a screen from light to dark. It'd be absurd to fight the comfort that this can provide.

I WFH and can have pretty much any setup I want, and I prefer dark on light background. Certain colors are harder for the eye to see (blue is a big offender) and yet, we have UI designers putting blue on a black background. So, I use a lighter color background, dark-ish font color and I have a 15% brown tint on my glasses. Ahhh.. comfort.

So, I agree, it's cool to be comfortable.

CRTs were default black, yet we went from dark to light backgrounds during their heyday.

Text mode terminals used black background, so did XY displays which used memory tubes. When graphical, bitmapped high resolution displays arrived, they nearly universally were white background with black text - but trivially switchable (starting from late 1970s)

I like dark mode for simple practical reasons: I have a multimonitor setup and I hate it when a monitor shines bright light into my eyes from the side — this is of course purely subjective. I also work a lot with colors and I’d like to avoid bright colors on secondary displays for that reason as well.

There are studies linking the high blue light content of LEDs to health issues regarding eyesight and sleep. AFAIK the eyesight thing has only be tested with mice, but conduct your own research.

I use dark wallpapers for years now, and just yesterday when I wanted to try a brighter one for a change I instantly changed it back because the bright shine was so annoying.

> Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something.

I suspect this is a big part of it. The interesting thing is, terminal emulators flipped to light backgrounds when it became practical (for instance, see the Solaris X11 one, or, later, Apple's one). The reversion to white on dark was a later thing.

I'm inclined to blame Microsoft; their Windows terminal emulator never went dark on light (though, interestingly, their bundled telnet and modem clients did). I think they were afraid of breaking DOS software that made assumptions about the black background.

Generally early GUI systems were black-on-white monochromatic, but switchable (and easily so, for the whole system). The thing is, which one is really better depended a lot on personal preference AND ambient light - and original systems supported both, but often assumed brightly lit room.

bro you dont need "real data" to convince yourself that water is wet. if you have eyes you can get "empirical data":

go into dark room. read black text on white background. observe how you are squinting and its hard to read. enable dark mode. (you can use something like night mode for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-light-m... if you arent sure how). profit.

This can be fixed by turning the light on.

Most work areas are not lit well enough. For my own home office I have about 19,000 lumens of light in a relatively modest space. Same brightness as a cloudy day outside. In that environment, a white background is very pleasing to the eye, especially with crisp displays.

One advantage of dark backgrounds is that it's easier to distinguish many colors against something dark, so for code that uses heavy syntax highlighting, it looks nicer. But the edges of characters render better against white backgrounds, so it's a tradeoff...

One area where dark mode shines is if the environment doesn't allow for ambient light, such as checking the phone or laptop when someone is sleeping in the room.

For some people with astigmatism this is a worst case scenario. As you try and read a light font on a dark background in a dark room, the pupil opens up, letting more light in, however opening up the pupil this way exacerbates the effect of the deformed cornea.

> go into dark room.

If you have a computer, you probably have electric lighting. Just use that.

I'm not a night owl. I prefer dark mode. It matters when you're staring at a screen for more than 12 hours a day

What we really really need is cheap, high resolution, fast refresh eInk displays.

I’m talking 27 inch, 4K resolution, color (even just 4096 colors might be enough for a lot of software development work) monitors running at 60Hz or higher, with eInk technology and backlight that can be dialed all the way from full brightness to no backlight at all, which should be sold at a price somewhere between the same and 2x to 3x or 4x the price of what LED displays of similar size and specs currently cost today.

I hope we may see that on the market one day.

Laptop in the sun outside. It’s the dream.

I used to use my OLPC xo-1 this way. It was a dream.

E-ink screens can make dark mode irrelevant. But the market for them hasn't been built, and the tech isn't effective at fast refresh. Yet.

I would pay good money for this.

Agreed. Anything more than an hour or two and it's definitely nicer to have a dark mode.

I used dark mode in IDEA for YEARS and I can't believe I didn't push harder to have a dark mode in Polar earlier.

This is why it's good to listen to your users!

> It matters when you're staring at a screen for more than 12 hours a day

I stare at a screen for more than 12 hours most days, but I strongly prefer light mode over dark, so I'm not sure the amount of screen time is what makes the difference.

People are different. Some can't handle the light. Some can't see as well in the dark.

As one of the former, I find I am also very sensitive to light at night. Seeing a bright light within an hour or two of bedtime will push the point when I fall asleep back significantly.

Discord has one of the worst light modes I've ever seen. Until recently, the sidebar taking up 20% of your screen on the left didn't even change colors, it remained in dark mode regardless of if you swapped. Also note that the role colors most servers assign contrast way too poorly with light background (bright yellow on white). And dark mode is the default. Worst example to try to extrapolate from.

I like the light theme being split between dark and light, though it feels weird and unfinished.

I'd definitely take the Discord data with a heap of salt: I prefer light themes, but I use dark in Discord because Discord's light theme is terrible and hurts my eyes.

I haven't read the article but the Discord light mode is TERRIBLE. Terrible contrast and half the interface remains in dark mode. That's why I don't use it. Otherwise I would. So it's kinda forced dark mode for Discord. That stat can not be trusted.

https://i.redd.it/qre9cvey3r0z.png

Are you sure you don't have a custom theme installed? Mine looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/FBBh1tm.png

It's a screenshot I've found on the Internet. Perhaps they've updated it; I haven't used Discord in months.

They fixed it... I talked about it in my post.

I’m a night owl and prefer day mode due to the wakeful effects you described, but I keep Night Shift on 24/7 to reduce blues.

I'm a night owl and dislike dark mode. Prefer solarized light theme everywhere :)

> I recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls

A "night owl" is someone who enjoys being awake and active at night more than the average person, but most people who describe themselves as "night owls" still spend most of their waking hours during the day, especially when they are working, especially if they work in software development at a normal 9-5 job.

Need better evidence to believe this stat too but I do prefer the dark mode personally. For what it's worth, I've been running the dark mode on my site for almost 3 weeks now. 60,000+ visitors since the change and no complaints for now.

If system-wide themes really worked, I'd probably be switching now and then between light and dark themes. Dark mode is kind of gloomy but it's also easier on the eyes.

System wide themes used to work, and we didn't need an explicit Dark Mode because of it. Sadly, computer interfaces have regressed significantly from 1995.

Latest releases of MacOS (and iOS) have it, and you can even set it to go into dark mode automatically at night.

Well, I meant something with more freedom of styling, not just some established light and dark theme. Like change the colors of system-wide buttons, text inputs, window title-bars, tabs, etc. Change the system-wide accenting color to Red, Blue, Green, Gold, etc.

You can also change the accent color on MacOS! If you want more customization than there’s Linux.

Thanks. I tried to find more data but it's scarce. I would love to get more data for more apps as I think it's definitely biased around people who spend a LOT of time staring at text.

I'm a programmer so spend a ton of time in my IDE. Polar is designed for people that read a LOT so dark mode really matters to them.

When you're reading 100s of PDFs having a dark mode is kind of important!

In retrospect I'm kicking myself not working on this sooner.

Most of the data that I've found suggests that dark text on a light background is measurably more legible than the reverse. This effect is increased for people with astigmatism -- which is about half the population, so that's not insignificant.

There's a lot of pushback I've seen when studies like that get cited: they're old, they weren't about programmers, etc. And, maybe, but even though we're staring at LCD panels now rather than CRTs, light is light light and vision is vision. It's not about how much light is "shining into your eyes" as much as it is about visual acuity, and it's at least worth trying light mode and just... turning down the brightness on your monitor a little. Also, turning up the ambient light in the room. If your environment is so dark that the backlighting on your keyboard is visible, then you've tacitly designed your environment to make light mode blinding and uncomfortable, so you're not really giving it a fair shake.

I'd like to see studies about whether alternating between dark and light mode occasionally will help prevent your eyes from getting tired as quickly; my suspicion is yes, because it certainly does feel that way to me. But a lot of things that seem intuitively true don't stand up to scrutiny.

I imagine you don't know the answer, but I'm curious as to if these studies were controlled for screen glare.

Dark themes/backgrounds have far worse issues with screen glare from badly configured room lighting than light ones do in my experience.

-----

I'm also curious why another area of design that is extremely concerned with legibility seems to have reached the opposite conclusion, pretty much worldwide.

Road signs.

Even though signs themselves can vary widely, the standard color scheme for road signs in every developed country I can think of, is a darker background with lighter text. I certainly don't have the studies in front of me, but I know a great deal of research has gone into fonts and legibility for road signs, and I presume what we see on the roads in the world is the result.

You are correct, I don't know if they controlled for screen glare. :)

The road signs are an interesting question. I know there's a lot of work, and occasional controversy, over the typefaces used. If I had to hazard a guess for the color choices, though, it might be the signs have to be very visible in the dark, too -- that's now generally done by using reflective paint for the light part of the sign, but older highway signs, at least in America, used reflective dots in the letters. So that might be a tradition born less out of legibility studies than practicality.

My astigmatism gives me doubles in any high contrast situation, whether light on dark or dark on light. Solarized/Zenburn type low-contrast palettes are the only thing that really addresses it.

I've noticed that when my eyes are tired as well. I think well-considered low-contrast color schemes don't get enough love, and I'm still a fan of Solarized, too. (Although my favorite schemes, both light and dark, are Spacemacs'.)

I would say you have an interesting article here, and your user poll is interesting too. But like you said you don't really have the data to back up this claim, so it just comes off as really click-baity. It worked, as I've never heard of your product and am clicking around the site now, but it's disappointing none the less.

I think it would be fine if the title just said "95% of our users prefer dark mode" rather than trying to generalize it to all people.