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Dark Mode for Slack
- epanchin 7y agoNow that’s done, please delete the drafts section, so messages stay in one place?
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoYes. This please. I so so SO hate the drafts section. Regularly I have DM conversations with people and might have typed out half a message when I need to respond to another channel/DM. But when I go back to the first conversation... it's gone. Because instead of being at the bottom of my list where I expect to see it (like I do the other 99.99999% of the time)... it's up at the top. Don't. Move. Around. The. UI.
- DuskStar 7y agoOr, if they want to keep the drafts section... Duplicate the channel, don't move it. That way you get the best of both worlds
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoOr simply provide a preference setting. Sure, if you like it go for it. But I don't, let me turn it off.
- pwinnski 7y agoThis is the key. I don't think most people would care about the drafts section if it appeared and disappeared without disrupting the normal way of doing things!
- Deimorz 7y agoI suggest getting used to switching around using Ctrl-K instead of using the mouse. If you only have one "draft", just pushing Ctrl-K, Enter will take you back to it. If there's more than one, you might need to type a couple of letters before pushing Enter.
- anaphor 7y agoMy main two feature requests would be: - Add a way to mute notifications from an individual user - Add a way to organize threads by topic For the first one, I believe they've said they will never implement it. For the second one, I'm holding out that someone will realize how crappy the threading implementation is, but I don't have much hope.
- benburleson 7y agoOh man, completely muting a user would be amazing.
- sincerely 7y agoUnfortunately I believe they've said "since this is a product for professional workplaces we don't see a need for this feature".
- saagarjha 7y agoProfessional workspaces always contain chatty people…
- dewey 7y agoAnd how exactly do you explain that you didn’t get the important ping of something being broken because you muted the person? Seems like a lot more problems than just telling the person to be less chatty in important channels.
- benburleson 7y agoImportant alerts should be automated from some software, not from the coworker that thinks every shower-thought is good #random material.
- dewey 7y ago
- wayneftw 7y agoI really wish they would let you turn off the whole "show other users' typing activity" thing, so that people don't hold back their replies if they see someone else replying. I'd turn it off for our whole org if I could because I'd rather the conversation happen quickly than...well I'm not sure what their goal is. It's like they're taking a page from Apple's anti-user/anti-choice playbook for iOS Messages by not giving you a painfully obvious option at all, at any level.
- freediver 7y agoWhy is this HN front-page worthy?
- buboard 7y agoThe wheel was always an interesting invention
- MoronInAHurry 7y agoBecause people upvoted it and that's how HN works.
- homonculus1 7y agoWhy is this HN comment-section worthy?
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago- Many HN users are programmers or work in other tech jobs. - Many HN users use Slack at this job or have interacted with someone who does. - Many HN users hate how Slack is an Electron app that consumes too many resources for the simple functions it performs. - Many HN users follow app trends, including the fact everything is adding a dark mode lately. These four reasons are why this would make it to the HN front page.
- GhostVII 7y agoI wish people still used things like GTK. Every app I install that uses GTK has dark mode enabled by default, and fits my system theme.
- lux 7y agoAny chance they'll ever improve threaded discussions? Or take cues from competitors like Zulip and add forum-style topics? One can dream.
- thanatropism 7y agoWhat's the deal with dark modes? With glossy laptop screens they're 100% unreadable in good natural light conditions; even with a matte screen, they're pretty bad.
- derefr 7y ago> good natural light conditions Dark modes are for... the dark.
- eddieh 7y agoNot to mention, in dark mode window shadows and other UI hints are not discernible. Dark mode is a usability nightmare and after the initial intrigue of something new was gone, I set my computer back to light mode.
- wishinghand 7y agoI just prefer less light hitting my eyeballs. The only time I use light modes are when I'm giving a presentation and want my screen to be more legible under super bright fluorescents.
- grumblestumble 7y agoLaptop displays are unfortunately limited to the "good enough" solution of additive light. We're stuck with it because it works well enough, so it's not important to sink tons of money and research in bringing e-ink style displays up to par. As a result, "light mode" means bombarding your eyes with... light. This is not good. Dark pixels are pixels that emit less light. This is much better for your eyes.
- camhenlin 7y agoI'm not sure if it's real or not, but I feel like dark mode apps are easier on my eyes. I sit in front of a computer in my office most of the day, and I don't need a bunch of white light shining in my face all day. I prefer to have the majority of the screen be dark colors and text be light colored.
- WorldMaker 7y ago> good natural light conditions So many of us are stuck in situations of bad fluorescent light or worse. The biggest benefits of dark modes are on OLED screens, such as most "flagship" handheld computers these days. On a modern OLED, a black pixel may be entirely unlit, which entirely reduces the amount of light being fired at your retinas during your screen hours. It's also a small power savings when multiplied by lots of unlit pixels across a day. But at the end of the day, it's also just aesthetic choice. Some people like the Batman approach of paint everything as black and dark as possible. It's okay for people to have a variety of tastes, and nice that "Dark Mode" frenzy has increased options across every platform (whether or not you think you want or need such options).
- psychometry 7y agoI have the latest Mac version (4.0.3) and I see no such option.
- TacticalTable 7y agoI had to restart slack to get the themes preference page to appear.
- psychometry 7y agoThanks. This should really be noted in the blog post.
- Diti 7y agoRIP IRC, which had the advantage of offering people the opportunity to use any client they like.
- xfitm3 7y agoYep - I desperately want /ignore back. Lots of annoying bots.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- barnabee 7y agoIt sucks that the protocol is proprietary but there seems to be a reasonably healthy ecosystem of 3rd party Slack clients so that advantage isn’t totally gone. I find the wee-slack plugin for the WeeChat IRC client to be pretty good (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack)
- lnx01 7y agoPidgin with libpurple/libslack is also great. A bit quirky, but it works.
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoSitting on the web. No such option currently exists.
- Latty 7y agoI had the same thing, refreshed and it was there.
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoMultiple hard refreshes later and it did arrive.
- charliesharding 7y agoSad news for custom emoji users. So many look bad now. In all seriousness though - I don't see why all apps/sites don't develop in a "dark mode" first mindset. With all the studies showing eye strain related health issues correlated to bright screens, you'd think this would be an easy solution to help alleviate the problem. Imagine writing your name in the sand on a beach by digging out all the area around the text to make it appear.. why project mostly background light with dark content as opposed to projecting the content and letting the dead space remain dark.
- davidsawyer 7y agoYeah, transparent emoji backgrounds are crucial.
- adamrt 7y agoHow is this sad news? - Its not a forced change. Don't do anything and emojis are fine. - Even if it was forced, is slack responsible for every possible customization? (Hey I like using black text always! Its hard to see black text in dark mode!) Its an additional feature. It seems like such a weird thing to be sad/complain about.
- charliesharding 7y agoIt was mainly intended as a joke but I agree that I didn't make that clear. It's just a minor inconvenience for a massive quality of life improvement
- misnome 7y agoSomeone complained about ours on their phone client so I’ve been testing when adding a new one. I’m anal enough that I’d _love_ to be able to upload dark-mode variants, though. Proper transparency can’t solve everything.
- philwelch 7y agoInterestingly this actually varies by display technology. CRT’s are default black and have light projected onto them. LCD’s are default white and to display black you have to block the light, which is why LCD blacks aren’t as black. I believe OLEDs are default black once again, which is why they have deeper and darker blacks.
- Scarbutt 7y agoIs dark mode a fashion thing or does it really helps with eye strain? In darker surroundings, I just lower the brightness.
- bmpafa 7y agoI think it's a fashion thing with a thin veneer of eye strain reduction (since, AFAIK, there's little conclusive evidence dark mode matters here)
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI have HN and a terminal open side by side, and I can tell you HN is more painful to look at, simply because it's like shining flashlight into the eyes compared to a black-background terminal.
- acid303 7y agoYou should try using dark mode extensions like DarkReader if you aren't already. I have it enabled on most sites and it works almost flawlessly. [0]https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
- balaksakrionon 7y agoI want to try it badly but it goes against most fibers of my being to give a 3rd party extension such crazy permissions: Access your data for all websites Access browser tabs
- yuft 7y agoHow else would it rewrite the styles for every page?
- eternalny1 7y agoDark Background on Light Text extension is great and you can customize the colors. Also, try Stylus with the "Hacker News Readable Dark" style.
- fucking_tragedy 7y agoWe wouldn't need to wait for Slack to get around to implementing a dark mode interface if we could just use the protocol with clients of our choosing.
- deweller 7y agoFor Mac Users: I had to choose View -> Reload (Command R) form the top menu bar to make this option show up for me.
- t0mbstone 7y agoYeah I had to completely stop and restart the Slack app before the new feature showed up
- void445be54d48a 7y agoFinally fulfilling a ~2013 request that is basically a style sheet. Better late than never I guess
- hotdogs 7y agoYeah, but they got to gradually develop "Slack Kit" and release a blog post patting themselves on the back for doing so to fulfill a 5 year old feature request. You can't just do that in CSS!
- Cyberdog 7y agoI've been using an unofficial Discord and Slack client called Ripcord for a while now. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ It uses a dark theme by default, which is very appreciated. Another huge plus is that it's not Electron garbage like the official Slack and Discord clients, so you don't have to effectively run one or two other entire web browsers just to do a bit of chatting. On the other hand, it is Qt garbage instead, so it still doesn't integrate with macOS's look and feel very well, and a long-standing bug is that when disconnecting my laptop from a wired ethernet connection, it doesn't automatically reconnect everything once the system switches over to wifi. Neither of these have stopped me from preferring it over the official clients, though. I recommend anyone not satisfied with the crust and bloat of the official Slack and Discord clients to give it a try. EDIT: But, yes, IRC is still the better choice when possible.
- amyjess 7y agoAs a KDE user, this looks really tempting. The only thing I'd be worried about is that using third-party clients is a violation of Discord's TOS, and I'd be terrified of getting banned for using it. Do you know if Discord has a history of banning Ripcord users, or is it something they look the other way on?
- Insanity 7y agoIf you want to be completely on the safe side, don't use ripcord. That said, for what it's worth, I haven't known someone getting banned yet.
- Cyberdog 7y agoI've never heard of them banning anyone for using this or some other unofficial client, no. I'd imagine a more effective approach to urge people to use the official client would be to simply block access from unofficial clients first before they start entirely banning accounts and pissing people off… but you never know, I guess.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
- gtirloni 7y agoI'm more interested in if/when they will fix threads.
- Insanity 7y agoThreads in slack are horrible. The idea isn't great in itself imo, but the implementation is a terrible experience. Constantly showing "more messages" link at the bottom unless you use the small sidebar. A couple or groups I am in decided to avoid them entirely
- dillonmckay 7y agoI am wanting to try twist.com, but alot of the non-technical folks are still in love with Slack. I think threading by default and forcing a topic would be better for channels.
- rackad 7y agoInteresting. I will give it a try to see if I like it or prefer the default one that I have been using for a couple of years.
- vanderZwan 7y agoSomething that got much less attention but deserves it (IMO) is that they have accessible themes for people with color-vision deficiencies. There is a theme for people with tritanopia and one for protanopia & deuteranopia. Having protanopia myself I'm very grateful for any piece of software that takes these issues seriously. For those on Visual Studio Code: the slack themes are also available there, including the color blind themes.
- chadlavi 7y agoThey've had these for a while! I have a coworker with protanopia and we've all started using that theme.
- makewavesnotwar 7y agoFunny that as Discord releases a light theme, Slack releases a dark theme. But in seriousness, does Slack really have any value proposition over Discord beyond Screen Hero these days? I switched my organization over to Discord based on the ability to create public channels for testers/customers to communicate with my team on the server without any role-based overhead (also because my target market is largely the Twitch/gamer crowd - most of whom already have Discord set up). I understand that there are less integrations baked in, but most are easily worked around with webhooks.
- bobakanoosh 7y agoJust a sidenote - Discord has always had a light theme, they just revamped it recently. Sadly the light theme will never be usable until they change the color of rank names and such not. The majority of people use dark theme, so they make server icons and role colors that look good on dark theme, not light theme.
- jedieaston 7y agoDiscord doesn't have any integrations for Enterprise users, like SSO, retention policies, etc. Many large companies probably wouldn't be able to use it, not to mention we don't know what Discord is doing with the data (not that it is a bad chat tool, it's great, but only really useful for casual groups).
- yuft 7y agoDo we know what Slack is doing with the data?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 83457 7y agoThreaded conversations are nice
- grardb 7y ago
- floetic 7y agoWonder how many trees this mode effectively saves. Google.com should have a darkmode soon I hope. :P
- alanbernstein 7y agohttp://blackle.com/ http://blackle.com/ is still around, if you're serious.
- el_duderino 7y agoHTTPS is not configured correctly, nor does it have a valid TLS cert, which is from 2010. And they are running Apache 2.2.3. Yikes!
- saagarjha 7y agoVery few, I’d assume.
- lnx01 7y agoDarkReader extension for Chrome/Firefox works for me.
- socialist_coder 7y agoThis is actually a pretty bad implementation. It's very hard to read compared to my IDE dark modes. Like the font weight is too high or something. I had to change back to Light mode. I'm all about dark mode but not a fan here. They need to spend some time and make it more readable.
- ledauphin 7y agoI strongly agree. I use dark modes on almost all my other desktop applications where it is available, but after a few hours of using the dark mode in Slack my eyes got tired. If they allowed customization of the main dark background color this would be remediable, but the only part of the theme that can be changed is the sidebar. After literally years of promises, this is such a poor implementation that it's shocking. And I say this as someone who actually mostly likes Slack as a product.
- socialist_coder 7y agohttps://github.com/LanikSJ/slack-dark-mode https://github.com/LanikSJ/slack-dark-mode That is a much better dark mode for Slack but it's still not good enough. The channel list is still very offensive.
- rolleiflex 7y agoHuman eye’s signal amplification curve is not linear. [1] You can’t convert an existing app to dark mode so much as building a new design for it, or it looks weird. Youtube’s Dark mode is an example of this uncanny valley. Funnily enough, they themselves illustrated the issue with the first image on their post, in how weird the version on the left looks. Besides - what we need isn’t a full dark mode, it’s an app that is built for the human eye. Dark mode is as extreme as staring into a white lightbulb all day, which is what the light mode is. An example of this is Aether (disclosure: it’s a project I’m designing for: https://aether.app https://aether.app). It’s designed for the ‘dark’ mode from scratch, or rather, it’s at 40% mode and it’s the only UI, so it aims to work well for both day and night. So we don’t have to go for the one or the other. (I’m not sure about posting here since it’s a ‘Slack competitor’ and I don’t want to look like advertising, but hey, I guess it’s relevant) [1] Contrast Threshold Curve of Human Vision https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve-of-human-vision_fig1_253055649 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve...
- alanbernstein 7y ago> You can’t convert an existing app to dark mode. How can this possibly be true? Are you trying to say something else, like "just changing colors is not sufficient to create a high quality dark mode"? That is probably why it's a "mode" and not a "theme". This tool looks nice though. This type of threading is much more appropriate for work conversations, in my experience.
- rolleiflex 7y agoYes, sorry, that was a little hyperbolic, so I edited to correct. I meant sometimes the things that you need to do to make a dark mode is not just changing colours, but also to produce new design work, since not all of the existing design can be converted. (And thanks — I agree. It saves quite a bit of productivity in our own remote team every day.)
- samtimalsina 7y ago> Youtube’s Dark mode is an example of this uncanny valley. What uncanny valley? I have been using Youtube's dark mode for a while now, and much prefer it to the default light mode. The light mode appears jarring and "noisy" for some reason.
- AzzieElbab 7y agoFinally a breakthrough !!!
- keatr 7y agothat would be really cool, think
- eikenberry 7y agoHopes dashed. I have wanted a dark mode for a long time but the color they picked is a dark blue gray which I find unpleasant. I would rather keep the neutral white/grey-scaled light theme than that. I can only hope that they will eventually make it customizable like the other elements.
- kakuri 7y agoSorry to hear - it's really taken them a long time to do this, but I'm pleased with the results. I've been using Stylish + Slack Dark - have you tried that? https://userstyles.org/styles/160324/slack-dark-mode https://userstyles.org/styles/160324/slack-dark-mode
- joebasirico 7y agoI use the Hoth theme in Slack and through it was pretty cute that they change the name of that theme to Dagobah in dark mode.
- rcarmo 7y agoI wish they fixed the recurring “enable desktop notifications” prompt in the browser as well. It’s beyond annoying to use Slack in a browser these days because it, especially if (like myself) you only go in for a few minutes every hour and close the tab afterwards.