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Comment by xori | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan, of the "don't use black, use dark-grey" mentality. As an alternative, may I recommend "back lighting" your windows.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/1e/31/971e311093599ce52b99...

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Could you clarify what this means on a monitor? It looks great in photos, but if I have light text on a dark background, I don't want to replace that with dark background, dark text, and a halo between the two.

More broadly, my experience is just that I can accept higher contrasts in dark-on-light than the reverse. TextEdit light is 0 on 255, and I find it slightly harsh in some lighting. TextEdit dark is only 255 on 30, and even that's enough to be consistently annoying. Sublime's ~248 on ~40 is way more usable for me.

I don't claim that this is "perfection" but as an example

  https://jsfiddle.net/c06fkq2a/

Use white for the key-light shadow, and a black for the ambient shadow.

Thanks, interesting! I think I misunderstood the initial comment as somehow back-lighting the inside of a window to highlight text, which confused me.

Now that I see what you mean, this is definitely better - the grey-on-black windowing of the original link is far less clear than backlighting each pane.

It's a lovely picture, but I can't help but feel that a concrete example with actual windows would be more informative. Do you do this? Can we see a screenshot of your desktop?

Also, dark blue text against black or dark gray is absolutely horrible for legibility.

For any poor soul reading this AND regularily reading journalctl output on a black background AND using xterm; Add this to your .Xresources:

  !makes blue readble on black background
  XTerm.VT100.color4: CornflowerBlue

It made my ... friends life a lot better

Thank you very much. It's going to be very helpful to my... squirrel. Such a silly critter.

I don't like and recommend using black because it causes purple ghosting on most OLEDs, gray doesn't.

I don't know about Apple-land, but if we're going for generic advice, I'm in favor of black on mobile, because it not only doesn't ghost purple on AMOLED screens, it saves battery life in a very visible way.

Measurements have shown that black and gray don't have a big difference in power consumption. https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod...

It also looks extremely weird if you look at the screen from too much of an angle. Almost like a negative, but not really reverse colours. Maybe anti-solarized.

A while back, I remember people were writing subtle watermarks that took advantage of that effect. Straight-on everything looked normal. On a wide enough angle, the logo was pretty unmistakable.

> "don't use black, use dark-grey" mentality

They only do this because the iOS UI uses darkening to indicate depth, with no alternatives for dark mode - it has to be something other than pure black or there's nothing to darken. It's a band-aid.

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