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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

It is comical we are getting excited about a bunch of CSS files and other assets.

As others have pointed out: Desktop apps never had this problem and decent operating systems gave you much more freedom to adjust the color style to your liking.

Now we have half-assed solutions running in a hypertext display engine. Amazing! ;)

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IIRC, Windows and macOS only offered built in dark mode in the system UI components until the last year or two, and definitely don’t offer much color customization freedom... except for the global highlight or accent color

It used to be far more customisable for Windows; this is Windows 2.03:

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

3.11:

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

95:

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

...and that dialog remained almost unchanged up until Windows 7:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers_new_2/windows-7-s...

Unfortunately, after Win7 it was removed, and they basically took away customisation completely in Win10.

What's left of customization is the choice of an "accent color", plus light and dark modes.

Except this new Windows light and dark mode option only changes the colors on a handful of applications, meaning most Win32 apps then look out of place.

Whereas that older style of Windows color configuration would automatically adjust each and every well behaved Win32 application.

Mac OS had themes (briefly) back in 1998 [1]. Linux (GTK+ and Qt) still do. Windows has supported custom fonts/colors since at least 1992, even if the result wasn't always tasteful [2].

[1]: https://www.blakespot.com/mac/Images/Gallerypix/drawing2.jpg [2]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...

The Windows color scheme editor is long gone. Don't know if it was Vista or 7 when it disappeared.

Windows 10 is a shitshow.

> It is comical we are getting excited about a bunch of CSS files and other assets

Especially on a site like stack overflow when there are literally 10,000 other things they need to improve that would be appreciated more.

That's the SO way, though—there's so much they need to fix and won't or can't, that they need to distract from their user-hostility by making a fuss over whatever small user-positive things they do do.

Don't laugh, it has real consequences on health: "black text on white paper heavily overstimulated retinal OFF pathways. Conversely, white text on black paper overstimulated ON pathways." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598

I have good experience using the theme-changer package in emacs which turns dark theme after sunset automatically.

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