3 ms·
Terminals and IDEs predated flat design by decades, and yet darker themes have always been around for those. I really don't think dark mode is merely a respons
by jawns 7y ago
Terminals and IDEs predated flat design by decades, and yet darker themes have always been around for those. I really don't think dark mode is merely a response to flat design.
- redisman 7y agoTerminals have almost always been dark mode. MS DOS is a great example of a very popular OS that was fully dark mode. Or any installation of Unix or Linux without a window manager. Tying it to flat-design just sounds like a lack of familiarity with the history of computer interface design.
- tedunangst 7y agoSunOS boots up dark on light.
- majormajor 7y agoEven Apple's been toying with similar things since the mid-90s, with Copland and the "Hi-Tech" theme. https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 Windows made it pretty easy to roll your own dark mode in the 9x days, and Kaleidoscope was around for Mac users.
- kitsunesoba 7y agoI really miss Kaleidoscope. No OS theming system I’ve come across since has been as smooth and all-encompassing — WinXP/Win7 msstyles and the various themeable bits in a Linux desktop come closest, but still fall short because they’re often incomplete and using them is a multi-step process. With Kaleidoscope, you just double-clicked the scheme file in the Finder and _everything_ was themed, from window frames to buttons to fonts to icons, and there were practically no limits to what scheme designers could do. There were a lot of impractical schemes, sure, but they were creative, fun, and personal in a way computer UI hasn’t been in ages. Just take scroll through the tweets of this Kaleidoscope twitter bot for a taste: https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac