Are most people working with these themes in fairly low lit environments with a backlight? Because I assumed that current research indicated that in normal light darker text on a light background was actually less tiring for the eyes.
Dark themes don't work for me either. What did work though is reducing blue light, and lowering monitor brightness. My eyes were much happier after I discovered this.
No, they're just in their 20 somethings, so looking cool outweighs "will an old dude be able to read it" argument. When younger I also loved nothing more than sitting in the dark room and staring at green letters on the black console screen. However now, being an old dude myself, not driving myself blind has become an actual concern...
I'm 42. I still hate staring at a lightbulb, and have dark mode on all the time. And my vision ain't what it used to be.
Pure white on a pure black background is horrible, but off-whites on a darker background looks nice and doesn't strain my eyes like a canvas of white does.
Yeah, when I do use light themes, I mute them similarly. And I have the brightness on my screens turned down a bit, and the blue channel trimmed down a smidge.
All the lights in my house are at 2200K, so I definitely have a preference towards warmer light.
My theory is that it's like cilantro (some people think it tastes like soap) or like pineapple on pizza (which is objectively wrong, about this there can be no debate). I just can't stand bright light.
I'm sure a sizeable chunk of dark theme users do just like to pretend they're administering The Matrix or something. But not all of us :)
Why does this comment thread need a "get off my lawn" type response? Some people like dark themes cause white strains the eyes. I like off-white themes but none of those I've used are all that great for coding so I stick to dark themes
For some of the reasons mentioned by other people in this thread, I don’t think glasses actually fix the problem. I have astigmatism and generally light text on a dark background is difficult to focus on.
Contacts aren’t an option because my astigmatism is strong enough that a rotation of 2 degrees throws them off.
But separately from eyesight issues I thought there was some evidence to suggest that aesthetic preferences aside, dark lettering on lighter backgrounds was still easier to read.
Have you found that a combination of the right theme and glasses makes reading from the screen for hours comfortable?
I have read about that research but I don't think we can conclude from it that dark backgrounds are a fad. They have other advantages (e.g. matching the dark room I work in) and besides, most dark themes are not pure white on black, but something less contrasting.
I've always forced myself to take a break from the screen, and for very long (book length) stuff will always either use a hard copy or ebook so perhaps my usage patterns won't match yours. I use variants of solarized style light themes, though do experiment occasionally as I've never found the definite 'answer' to the best theme for me.
I don't think the research would conclude that dark backgrounds are a fad necessarily. The reason I'm attracted to themes with darker backgrounds is that they are generally better for getting a set of text colours with roughly equal levels of legibility - whereas lighter backgrounded themes often have two or three colours which are really hard to see. The flip side is that darker colours + astigmatism seem to lead to reduced breadth of vision.
