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Comment by rgry | Hacker News Reader

dark mode is not supposed to mean "full white on full black" :(

monochrome icons also not really helping in readability/recognition so it's a "no" on both those most visible changes...

but hey an update is an update and npp still rocks

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That's the thing though with well developed apps: I think I also dislike the new icons. But it doesn't really matter, since the old ones are still there and I can continue using them..

The dark mode seems a bit buggy still and the contrast really is to stark, but I am hopeful these problems will be addressed with time.

Not everything is always right at the beginning, but I am never afraid to update notepad++, which is a huge compliment these days.

> dark mode seems a bit buggy

Please let us know any bugs you encounter. A lot of dialogs and etc still do not support dark mode due to manual changes needed for each of them, unfortunately.

With an OLED laptop panel, I actually appreciate #000 black. A lot of these dark themes look kinda bad on my screen, especially when they try to tint the grey like the blue GitHub adds. That said, I'll give it to Twitter for implementing dark and black as separate categories since we don't have @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) and (display-technology: oled)

We tried to copy the colors from dark mode explorer for the most part. Eventually the configuration for this will be exposed.

I'm surprised that there is any need for an explicit dark-mode, and that Notepad++ wouldn't just pick up the system colors; it's old enough that it was customary to do that, and use the system named colors instead of specifying RGBs for control colors.

Do System colors even exist in windows 10? The option to set global color schemes seems to be long gone and Microsoft needed to spend extra effort to adapt a dark color scheme in explorer (It didn't support dark mode for a long time and then took some updates to work well across the board).

I always find it kind of funny and sad at the same time, that something windows could do 20 years age now needs to be implemented by each application separately.

Oh this brings memories of my Windows 98 tweaks and linear gradients in title bars. I'm afraid that's the peak of customizability and it's only going downhill in each operating system version.

Technically the API is there and you can actually run DESKN.CPL from an old version of Windows which allows you to customize the colors. Of course it also depends on applications to use them - most applications that use native controls use them, but others ignore them. Windows 10 'personalization' use them mainly to configure high contrast mode, but you can only edit a handful of values.

There do not seem to be system colors defined for dark mode. Explorer does it via uxtheme but does not seem to expose the colors themselves. Plus it ends up being un-configurable.

Ideally, dark mode would just be an OS-wide palette switch, which is how it used to work. Probably still would, as I don't think that the guts of Windows have actually changed; you just can't get at them through the Control Panel easily like you used to do.

Since Windows XP the common controls are themed which do not support the usual color customizations which were available before then. Some still support WM_CTLCOLOR but some don't, or only do in certain situations.

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