6 ms·

"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?" Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest re

"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?" Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in the light, but I surely find dark mode on screens a billion times more readable than traditional light modes. Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.

rhizome31 6y ago
It depends on the amount of light. Try reading a book outside on a clear summer day when the sun is at its zenith. Your eyes won't even stand it. It doesn't matter that the light comes from a direct source or from reflection. We can easily imagine more extreme experiments using mirrors and spotlights.
blunte 6y ago
It is likely that you have your display brightness too high. Indoors, in light mode, most modern screens need to be set at 50% or lower brightness.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I completely agree. Modern screens are made to stay readable in direct sunlight. The maximum brightness is really high. The screen I'm currently looking at is at 6/100 and I could probably turn it down a bit more.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Hold a piece of paper next to the display. If a white background on the display (e.g. open Notepad) is noticeably brighter than the paper, dial down the display's brightness. At work my brightness dial is down to 0. At home it's at 16. It looks wrong at first, but you'll get used to it within a day or so. Colleagues coming to your desk will remark upon it.
aasasd 6y ago
Emitted light isn't a problem per se, because reflected photons aren't somehow radically different from emitted ones. Color and brightness profile is the problem. On a display, you have to have high contrast and brightness for images (that have lots of darker areas), so the system interface is in turn tuned for this high brightness—and then you have to deal with bright white under text. Note how text on e-ink is excellently readable but photos look like crap—since they aren't carefully selected and adjusted for the medium like in print. On screens, black text on a-bit-gray-with-a-hint-of-red is better, like here on HN, though still not the same. I wonder if it's possible to get close to paper/e-ink colors on an LCD/OLED screen, or the backlight's color profile is too different (apparently LEDs emit narrow bands of wavelengths, which might be harsher for the eyes—while sunlight and incandescent lights have all or most of the visible spectrum).
- cnity 6y ago
  These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium. If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp. So there are two solutions to this. Turn on a lamp if you're using a screen at night time, and lower your brightness to have roughly the same level as the ambient light. Or, use night mode if you don't want to turn a lamp on. If I'm doing something like programming, I prefer the former. If I'm just in bed and feeling lazy and want to read twitter, I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on Yes. My use case is reading ebooks at night on a Kindle app in Dark Mode so that I don't disturb my partner who is trying to sleep.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Yes, it probably correlates with ambient light. I like light mode but I also like to open the blinds, turn on the lamps etc, as opposed to the stereotypical dark basement hacking with a hoodie on. Dark mode is also very often buggy, clumsy, the color schemes for syntax highlight are subjectively less pleasing, it feels gloomier, less cheerful, I see more distracting dust on the screen, smudges etc. Yeah I could also clean it more etc. The point is there can be multiple equilibra, one develops habits and preferences. It's not an absolute thing.
m12k 6y ago
Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (e.g. like polarization) or LED color reproduction at play, that CG models don't capture. Because as soon as you have a ray of light with a certain intensity and mix of wavelengths, it really shouldn't matter how it was produced, so I'm trying to understand the quantitative difference in what is produced.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Emissive displays don't react to incident light in the same way as paper, even if they try. And they've been trying for a long time -- my grandmother had a TV from the 1970s with an ambient light sensor that would match the ambient color temperature.
  - m12k 6y ago
    Could you explain why having the screen react more to incident light would be better?
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      It looks more like any other object within an environment, reducing eyestrain and improving the illusion of reality.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    They're getting better: https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/art-mode/ https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-... The first time I saw one of these in the flesh, it was striking. I'd be surprised if this kind of context-awareness in screens didn't work its way into most devices within the next decade.
  - necovek 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 6y ago
I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have I prefer unnecessary presentation dynamicity to be avoided).
- moviuro 6y ago
  ed(1) is plenty quiet already. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish. The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    If you two are serious about this, you'll defintely want to check out Technology Connections' series on e-ink: (quick intro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0 (starting the breakdown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k He talks about that exact concept and moves on to do real-world testing and setup of a very specific tablet usable as an external display. It's exactly as you say: Hacky and unpolished. But I found it extremely informative.
  - iCarrot 6y ago
    I'm aware of some options: The Boox Max 3 e-ink tablet can be used as an external monitor (HDMI connection) with good refresh rate. Dasung Paperlike 3 is a dedicated e-ink external monitor that can actually play video with really good refresh rate. Waveshare also makes e-ink external monitor, not as good as the Paperlike but coming at half the price.
m463 6y ago
I totally disagree. the s/n on white background is very high. the s/n on a black background is terrible (reflection easily overwhelm the signal) young eyes don't care older eyes, with less ability to reshape the lens of the eye need extra light to close down the pupil and put more stuff in focus without eyestrain.
- lostmyoldone 6y ago
  In some sense your eye might not care, but it really do seem that either eye or the brain cares. Not necessarily about the background or foreground itself unless the background is really bright, but something more like the relative contrast of our entire field of vision, and interacting with the size of elements. A good black and white (true grayscale CRT display) in a properly lit room can be eminently readable and cause very little eye strain. However, as soon as you start to use color and images, and/or the room isn't properly lit, it seems the level of contrast necessary for make colour look right - especially in images - also tend to make white backgrounds far too bright. According to my experience the effect get worse the bigger the screen is. It does seem to be an issue, but not really a problem with the text versus background color, rather because we handle gamut/contrast/color the same way in both UI elements, on screen text, and images. While this might partially be down to the last decades dominance of LCD screens with rather poor color rendering that nobody has cared to fix it, the color profiles of UI, text, and images should really be adjusted separately. So why does dark background seemingly alleviate this issue for some fraction of people? I don't know for sure, it could be the brain "averages" light over a small area, when determining some global brightness/contrast measure, thus making might on black seem less contrasty while still allowing use of brightness/color range that also works reasonably well for images? I notice my daughter brought up with screens around seem to care less, but that could be a coincidence.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  This is the biggest problem with the using dark mode on reflective screens. (Another one is that web sites force their own themes which are usually light, so switching between windows becomes painful.)
buboard 6y ago
fun fact, your retinal receptors are releasing transmitter in the dark and stop releasing it when activated by light.
stared 6y ago
> Yes, it is. Well, it's very dogmatic. Sure, for you it may be better, and if you "would never read a white text on black paper newspaper", it is fine. At the same time, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. If you have a research paper that Dark Mode is better for everyone, please share.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > Well, it's very dogmatic. The article is also quite dogmatic though.
  - fredoliveira 6y ago
    I disagree. The article points out sources for each of its claims.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    The article is based on practical research, which I don't believe can be called "dogma".
    - BossingAround 6y ago
      Well, it says that reading on light background is better because of X. It's dogmatic in that X is important, and therefore, it's better to do so.
buzzkillington 6y ago
>Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy. I run termux on top stock boox 3 as a thin(ish) client and it works amazingly well. It's some of the most enjoyable terminal time I have had in years because it's so limited.
coldtea 6y ago
>Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects your favorite light intensity.
- skywhopper 6y ago
  But, you often can’t turn down the brightness that much. And anyway the contrast of monitors is many times worse than the contrast of a printed newspaper. Photons are photons, but a screen sends very different pattern of photons to your eyes than a newspaper.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Is this true? Printed newspaper is the crappiest kind of paper as far as contrast goes. Anyway OLED monitors have good contrast and their brightness can be arbitrarily adjusted.
  - kijin 6y ago
    Then you need to get a better monitor. Some of the cheaper ones out there are insanely bright just so they can put larger numbers in the brightness and contrast columns. Good panels have decent contrast even when you turn down the brightness.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Every night? Progressively as it gets darker? Manually? Plus, I'd need to re-adjust the contrast as well. I'm sure there's software that does that, but Dark mode seems like the easy-no-extra-work solution to this problem.
  - dsego 6y ago
    Apple's computers already do that, they have a sensor and adjust the backlight, some can even adjust the color tone to match the ambient light. I know, sounds like the future, but they had it for a while.
crispyambulance 6y ago
I find it weird that people feel the need to defend dark mode preferences based on arguments about why they think it's "objectively" better. Does it matter? I mean, do you have to have a reason for preferring dark mode? I like dark mode because it looks better (to me). I also prefer multi-color boxer shorts over white briefs. Does there have to be a justification? No. It's an aesthetic choice just like dark-mode, font-size, and color-temperature.
tigershark 6y ago
You can’t state it as a fact, it’s only your opinion. I’m using dark mode on my phone just because of the battery savings but I prefer much more light mode unless I’m reading before sleeping in a pitch black room.
dirkt 6y ago
I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that light mode is much easier on my eyes. Black text (real black, not this fancy grey web designers seem to prefer) and white background on a properly adjusted monitor where the white doesn't blind you is my go-to since monitors became good enough to make it possible. YMMV, of course.
- Terretta 6y ago
  By contrast, I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that dark mode is much easier on my eyes. Convinced? // Was and remain in the amber camp. /// See also: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ ”... we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.” And from a StackOverflow discussion: Visual fatigue research: Unfortunately I could not find very much research which measured computer screen visual fatigue in comparison to black-on-white text as opposed to white-on-black. The only piece I could find was a short reference in "Reading text from computer screens" by Mills and Weldon (1987) from the journal ACM Computing Surveys. Section 4.1 of that paper, titled "polarity", goes over important works at the time, including this piece: ”In contrast to the results in these studies, Cushman [1986] found that subjects who read continuous text from positive contrast (light character) VDTs reported less visual fatigue (as measured on a subjective rating scale) than those who read from negative contrast (dark character) VDTs.”
  - ses1984 6y ago
    I mean, parent post said "easier on my eyes" and "ymmv". It doesn't take much convincing for me to believe that light mode is easier on parents eyes and dark mode is easier on your eyes. I believe you.

rhizome31 6y ago

It depends on the amount of light. Try reading a book outside on a clear summer day when the sun is at its zenith. Your eyes won't even stand it. It doesn't matter that the light comes from a direct source or from reflection. We can easily imagine more extreme experiments using mirrors and spotlights.

blunte 6y ago

It is likely that you have your display brightness too high. Indoors, in light mode, most modern screens need to be set at 50% or lower brightness.

adrianN 6y ago
I completely agree. Modern screens are made to stay readable in direct sunlight. The maximum brightness is really high. The screen I'm currently looking at is at 6/100 and I could probably turn it down a bit more.
Tomte 6y ago
Hold a piece of paper next to the display. If a white background on the display (e.g. open Notepad) is noticeably brighter than the paper, dial down the display's brightness. At work my brightness dial is down to 0. At home it's at 16. It looks wrong at first, but you'll get used to it within a day or so. Colleagues coming to your desk will remark upon it.

aasasd 6y ago

Emitted light isn't a problem per se, because reflected photons aren't somehow radically different from emitted ones. Color and brightness profile is the problem. On a display, you have to have high contrast and brightness for images (that have lots of darker areas), so the system interface is in turn tuned for this high brightness—and then you have to deal with bright white under text. Note how text on e-ink is excellently readable but photos look like crap—since they aren't carefully selected and adjusted for the medium like in print. On screens, black text on a-bit-gray-with-a-hint-of-red is better, like here on HN, though still not the same. I wonder if it's possible to get close to paper/e-ink colors on an LCD/OLED screen, or the backlight's color profile is too different (apparently LEDs emit narrow bands of wavelengths, which might be harsher for the eyes—while sunlight and incandescent lights have all or most of the visible spectrum).

cnity 6y ago
These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium. If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp. So there are two solutions to this. Turn on a lamp if you're using a screen at night time, and lower your brightness to have roughly the same level as the ambient light. Or, use night mode if you don't want to turn a lamp on. If I'm doing something like programming, I prefer the former. If I'm just in bed and feeling lazy and want to read twitter, I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on Yes. My use case is reading ebooks at night on a Kindle app in Dark Mode so that I don't disturb my partner who is trying to sleep.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Yes, it probably correlates with ambient light. I like light mode but I also like to open the blinds, turn on the lamps etc, as opposed to the stereotypical dark basement hacking with a hoodie on. Dark mode is also very often buggy, clumsy, the color schemes for syntax highlight are subjectively less pleasing, it feels gloomier, less cheerful, I see more distracting dust on the screen, smudges etc. Yeah I could also clean it more etc. The point is there can be multiple equilibra, one develops habits and preferences. It's not an absolute thing.

m12k 6y ago

Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (e.g. like polarization) or LED color reproduction at play, that CG models don't capture. Because as soon as you have a ray of light with a certain intensity and mix of wavelengths, it really shouldn't matter how it was produced, so I'm trying to understand the quantitative difference in what is produced.

nitrogen 6y ago
Emissive displays don't react to incident light in the same way as paper, even if they try. And they've been trying for a long time -- my grandmother had a TV from the 1970s with an ambient light sensor that would match the ambient color temperature.
- m12k 6y ago
  Could you explain why having the screen react more to incident light would be better?
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    It looks more like any other object within an environment, reducing eyestrain and improving the illusion of reality.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  They're getting better: https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/art-mode/ https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-... The first time I saw one of these in the flesh, it was striking. I'd be surprised if this kind of context-awareness in screens didn't work its way into most devices within the next decade.
- necovek 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 6y ago

I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have I prefer unnecessary presentation dynamicity to be avoided).

moviuro 6y ago
ed(1) is plenty quiet already. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish. The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc
- scrollaway 6y ago
  If you two are serious about this, you'll defintely want to check out Technology Connections' series on e-ink: (quick intro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0 (starting the breakdown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k He talks about that exact concept and moves on to do real-world testing and setup of a very specific tablet usable as an external display. It's exactly as you say: Hacky and unpolished. But I found it extremely informative.
- iCarrot 6y ago
  I'm aware of some options: The Boox Max 3 e-ink tablet can be used as an external monitor (HDMI connection) with good refresh rate. Dasung Paperlike 3 is a dedicated e-ink external monitor that can actually play video with really good refresh rate. Waveshare also makes e-ink external monitor, not as good as the Paperlike but coming at half the price.

m463 6y ago

I totally disagree. the s/n on white background is very high. the s/n on a black background is terrible (reflection easily overwhelm the signal) young eyes don't care older eyes, with less ability to reshape the lens of the eye need extra light to close down the pupil and put more stuff in focus without eyestrain.

lostmyoldone 6y ago
In some sense your eye might not care, but it really do seem that either eye or the brain cares. Not necessarily about the background or foreground itself unless the background is really bright, but something more like the relative contrast of our entire field of vision, and interacting with the size of elements. A good black and white (true grayscale CRT display) in a properly lit room can be eminently readable and cause very little eye strain. However, as soon as you start to use color and images, and/or the room isn't properly lit, it seems the level of contrast necessary for make colour look right - especially in images - also tend to make white backgrounds far too bright. According to my experience the effect get worse the bigger the screen is. It does seem to be an issue, but not really a problem with the text versus background color, rather because we handle gamut/contrast/color the same way in both UI elements, on screen text, and images. While this might partially be down to the last decades dominance of LCD screens with rather poor color rendering that nobody has cared to fix it, the color profiles of UI, text, and images should really be adjusted separately. So why does dark background seemingly alleviate this issue for some fraction of people? I don't know for sure, it could be the brain "averages" light over a small area, when determining some global brightness/contrast measure, thus making might on black seem less contrasty while still allowing use of brightness/color range that also works reasonably well for images? I notice my daughter brought up with screens around seem to care less, but that could be a coincidence.
Koshkin 6y ago
This is the biggest problem with the using dark mode on reflective screens. (Another one is that web sites force their own themes which are usually light, so switching between windows becomes painful.)

buboard 6y ago

fun fact, your retinal receptors are releasing transmitter in the dark and stop releasing it when activated by light.

stared 6y ago

> Yes, it is. Well, it's very dogmatic. Sure, for you it may be better, and if you "would never read a white text on black paper newspaper", it is fine. At the same time, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. If you have a research paper that Dark Mode is better for everyone, please share.

BossingAround 6y ago
> Well, it's very dogmatic. The article is also quite dogmatic though.
- fredoliveira 6y ago
  I disagree. The article points out sources for each of its claims.
- square_usual 6y ago
  The article is based on practical research, which I don't believe can be called "dogma".
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    Well, it says that reading on light background is better because of X. It's dogmatic in that X is important, and therefore, it's better to do so.

buzzkillington 6y ago

>Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy. I run termux on top stock boox 3 as a thin(ish) client and it works amazingly well. It's some of the most enjoyable terminal time I have had in years because it's so limited.

coldtea 6y ago

>Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects your favorite light intensity.

skywhopper 6y ago
But, you often can’t turn down the brightness that much. And anyway the contrast of monitors is many times worse than the contrast of a printed newspaper. Photons are photons, but a screen sends very different pattern of photons to your eyes than a newspaper.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Is this true? Printed newspaper is the crappiest kind of paper as far as contrast goes. Anyway OLED monitors have good contrast and their brightness can be arbitrarily adjusted.
- kijin 6y ago
  Then you need to get a better monitor. Some of the cheaper ones out there are insanely bright just so they can put larger numbers in the brightness and contrast columns. Good panels have decent contrast even when you turn down the brightness.
koheripbal 6y ago
Every night? Progressively as it gets darker? Manually? Plus, I'd need to re-adjust the contrast as well. I'm sure there's software that does that, but Dark mode seems like the easy-no-extra-work solution to this problem.
- dsego 6y ago
  Apple's computers already do that, they have a sensor and adjust the backlight, some can even adjust the color tone to match the ambient light. I know, sounds like the future, but they had it for a while.

crispyambulance 6y ago

I find it weird that people feel the need to defend dark mode preferences based on arguments about why they think it's "objectively" better. Does it matter? I mean, do you have to have a reason for preferring dark mode? I like dark mode because it looks better (to me). I also prefer multi-color boxer shorts over white briefs. Does there have to be a justification? No. It's an aesthetic choice just like dark-mode, font-size, and color-temperature.

tigershark 6y ago

You can’t state it as a fact, it’s only your opinion. I’m using dark mode on my phone just because of the battery savings but I prefer much more light mode unless I’m reading before sleeping in a pitch black room.

dirkt 6y ago

I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that light mode is much easier on my eyes. Black text (real black, not this fancy grey web designers seem to prefer) and white background on a properly adjusted monitor where the white doesn't blind you is my go-to since monitors became good enough to make it possible. YMMV, of course.

Terretta 6y ago
By contrast, I am old enough to have written programs when "dark mode" was the default (black background and green or amber text, 40 columns, 80 columns if you were lucky), and I can tell you that dark mode is much easier on my eyes. Convinced? // Was and remain in the amber camp. /// See also: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ ”... we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.” And from a StackOverflow discussion: Visual fatigue research: Unfortunately I could not find very much research which measured computer screen visual fatigue in comparison to black-on-white text as opposed to white-on-black. The only piece I could find was a short reference in "Reading text from computer screens" by Mills and Weldon (1987) from the journal ACM Computing Surveys. Section 4.1 of that paper, titled "polarity", goes over important works at the time, including this piece: ”In contrast to the results in these studies, Cushman [1986] found that subjects who read continuous text from positive contrast (light character) VDTs reported less visual fatigue (as measured on a subjective rating scale) than those who read from negative contrast (dark character) VDTs.”
- ses1984 6y ago
  I mean, parent post said "easier on my eyes" and "ymmv". It doesn't take much convincing for me to believe that light mode is easier on parents eyes and dark mode is easier on your eyes. I believe you.