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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Finally dark mode! Some Windows only add-ons could do it. But now Mac and Linux can too

Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers.

What a pitiful regression it has been since then.

[1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...

[2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893...

[3] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAE...

[4] https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-sc...

Yeah, and X resources let us Linux nerds choose freely as well. This is what we get now that every application ships its own implementation of everything, including GUI toolkit.

To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling.

Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.

On windows 10, I have dark mode enabled system wide, but I struggle with most third party dark modes, the contrasts between components is not thought out enough - or in the case of email, styled html emails sometimes don't work on a dark background

Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled

Yes, in the background window in this screenshot https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png you can see manual Light and Dark options as well as Auto.

Those are the operating system's settings in Mac OS. It's not a Thunderbird dialogue (unfortunately).

Have it installed, such an option isn't available to me, in Win10

According to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 it should be under Addons -> Themes, at least in previous versions? But it was kinda buggy as of last month.

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