Hacker News Reader

Comment by jellyfishbeaver | Hacker News Reader

I must be in the extreme minority, I always prefer light themes.

For me my preference toward dark themes increased through the 2000s along with my need for syntax highlighting as I started writing more complex code. With light themes, syntax colors don’t “pop” nearly as well, giving me fewer visual anchors and making my eyes get lost in the code a lot more easily.

That said, I’m not fond of super dark or pure black-based themes and prefer those with a 75% gray background (with 100% being black) or thereabouts. With pure black themes the code pops too much and it feels like it’s all vying for my eyes’ attention at once.

I've also found that light themes have issues with syntax color "pop". I always make my own!

I changed my home office to my “luminarium” where I’m using about 700W of LED bulbs to get my lux to around 10,000. It’s a necessity that I use light mode, it’s impossible to see dark mode.

Also it effectively cured my SAD.

700 real watts or equivalent watts?

700 real watts of LED has got to be intense. Also your room would be very hot.

I routinely run 350 real watts, and go up to 1400 when I really need light. Helps with heating, but doesn't get all that hot.

1400 Watt of LEDs is the kind of lighting you'll find atop a tall pole in a sports stadium. That's ~200,000 lumen, or about 10x as much as you'd need to light a large room really brightly. If you put that next to a skylight, it would make the sun look dim. It's certainly not impossible, but that's a lot for a single point light source.

What are your rooms like? Do you live in a castle?

I have 2x SmallRig RC 350D [1] and Godox M600bi [2]. These are medium-spec videography lights that draw their rated power from the wall. Lux @ 3m is noticeably (10x) dimmer than the sun.

I have tripped my breaker when running the setup, so I run from two outlets on two breakers. For my current (quite large) room, I'd love to upgrade to the 5000W lights (Nanlux Evoke 5000B or the Aputure STORM XT52), but electrical wiring would be a hassle. For a standard room, I find 700W to be sufficient.

I also backed this project - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brighter-the-world-s-brig... - been following them since their Show HN.

[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1729860-REG/smallrig_... [2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1715199-REG/godox_kno...

For reference, this is a 1200 watt stadium light: https://www.ledlightingsupply.com/led-outdoor-lights/led-flo...

So it's not unfair to say that you're off by a order of magnitude. For a single stand, 2 orders if counting all the stands.

1400 W is a lot by conventional room lighting standards, but not if your objective is recreating daylight indoors.

This is what a 20kW incandescent bulb looks like in a home/backyard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT5_-A0m8_U

Before I even click that link I'm going to assume it's photoninduction.

Edit: It was! That mad lad!

I can’t believe he did that in an enclosed space. “It’s like having a bonfire in the room” indeed.

The sun is really bright. My outdoor Hue sensor regularly reads 50k+ lux in sunlight. A room in my house with 100 watts of LEDs reads ~300 lux from the sensor on my dresser.

Yeah it’s truly astonishing how bright the sun is when you start trying to recreate it at home. But my room is brighter inside than an overcast winter day outside! That was my goal, and it’s substantially improved my mood. I’d do a write up but my strategy has been “keep buying lights until it feels bright enough and distribute them around the room”. I should probably get a real lux meter I’ve just been using my phone which seems a bit off.

700 watt space heaters seem pretty common. I’d expect the heat produced by 700 watts of LEDs to be just a tiny bit less than the space heaters (as some of the energy will sneak out the window, photons being sneaky fellows).

Real watts. I’m working on getting more. I only use it in the winter when I’d be running a space heater anyway. So I’m not wasting electricity I’m just making a useful byproduct.

My dad also did that to my house too, and I had to try to find a corner dark enough to see my editor in dark mode lol

As a real Stan for good indoor lighting, I would like to know more about your setup.

I’m still experimenting, but right now it’s 28 bulbs attached to my ceiling fan with some 7-way splitters (the ceiling fan is an old one that supports 4 100W bulbs), two big corn bulbs, one 100W and one 250W, I’m still trying to figure out the best way to mount these. Then I had my daughter paint some art and I framed it using LED light strips, I’m gonna put it on the wall.

I haven’t really figured out a good way to diffuse the 250w corn bulb, its blinding to look at and it’s absolutely massive. Maybe I could use ABS and 3D print a translucent shroud and mounting bracket for it.

I had another 100W corn bulb that didn’t use a fan and it burned out after about a year.

I’ll be honest right now I’m in a transition period of moving rooms so I’ll often just spend 30 minutes in there in the morning, although last year I spent 8 hours a day in there. It really helped me during the big snowstorm the Midwest US had recently. I just bought cheap 200W equivalent LED bulbs until I got to the full 28, because that was super easy, then I’ve started experimenting.

In winter time when the sun is shining directly into the window that’s still brighter, but that happened maybe a dozen times over the last 80 days, even with a south facing window. This winter was super dreary.

Sorry I’m rambling, but Maybe at some point I’ll worry about CRIs but this was mostly an experiment. It has definitely helped but if you like indoor lighting you probably already know that.

Its not rambling if its useful. I have some crazy led cob lights that look like street lights when they're on. I might try them indoors. I have spares for my outdoor ones.

I might comment wattage and lux if I can, couple days.

The idea of 28 bulbs hanging off a ceiling fan sounds hilarious. Good on you though for finding what works and getting it done.

We're in the same boat, my eyes actually start hurting when I look at a light-on-dark screen for more than a couple of seconds.

I'm just really glad that my web browser has a reader mode, or else there would be quite a few web sites (blogs etc.) that I could not read.

I get horrified looks from my dev team when they look at my screen, but I typically use light mode for work, and I find it easier to read by a long shot.

For dev work at home, I use darkmode, but I usually work in a less well-lit environment and for less time.

Exactly. Light mode for coding in the sun. Dark mode for late night hacking.

Yeah, I remember back when I was a cringy teenager and bought into all the propaganda about why darkmode was better for eyes and whatnot, so much stuff.. So I spent 15 years or so with darkmode, untile one day, i read somewhere that the evidence of darkmode being better was not just lacking, but that people read dark letters on a bright background faster and more accurately than the other way around.. Now this is the Internet, with a capital I so I won't back up that claim with any references, and it's not important whether anyone believes that or not, fact is, that day, I thought "hm" and I switched my editor back to light mode and thought "hm, this is fine too" and I kept it long enough that I discovered that I prefer it.. Now, my xterm, I do want white on black, but that's just something about how that bitmap font looks to my eyes, that makes me want it that way.

But honestly, I don't get what the big deal is with either preference, it's not a big deal really.. black or white.. it's fine!

I use light mode during the day and dark mode from dusk till dawn. I do this because I find it more comfortable, not because I'm told by someone or a study that it's better.

that's fair, the study didn't convince me it was better, it just prompted me to switch back to white, because, actually, I don't know, and then I found that _if_ it made any difference, it was probably positive, but, even though I sit at the screen from dusk till dawn, I find no difference in how pleasant light or dark mode it, it just makes so little difference to me that I don't care :)

I suffer from astigmatism and dark themes fatigue me a lot.

Same here, I think that's why I prefer light themes when developing. Although I like my terminals dark for some reason.

same, mate. i'm not sure why people question or consider my preference (that actually affects my situation) as an unusual situation. haven't they ever seen a blind with a stick? to be exaggerating.

WIIIIIIIITCH!

Just kidding ;D

I'm actually studying my students' color theme preferences for lecture slides and I'm seeing that while a majority do prefer dark mode, there is noticeable chunk that still prefer light mode. I think some of it may involve time of viewing, but that is another research question I haven't explored quite yet.

In the daytime I prefer light mode, and at night I prefer dark mode. I think it's somewhat odd to have a preference inconsistent with the time of day.

Indeed this is the way.

I also have variants of light and dark for different lighting conditions at night and day (particularly glare).

how long have you been coding? I felt the same in my younger days but discovered over the years that dark mode much more gentle on my eyes.

Not the author, but I’ve been coding since the 90s and also ended up switching between light and dark depending on the time of day. The trick is to also adjust screen brightness. With light background you can lower overall brightness. With dark background if you’re in a well lit room, you have to increase brightness to the point where bright words on the screen actually shine too strongly in relation to the dark background. So it actually feels gentler when the background is light but screen brightness is dimmer overall.

Over 10 years. I used to be dark mode all the time, but in recent years I feel light mode in daytime is much clearer and doesn't clash with the ambient light which forces my eyes to strain more in daylight.

I actually went back from dark to light! Feels pretty good

I find it doesn't matter to me. Dark mode means I'm on a server 9/10 vis a vis code; otherwise I'm in notepad++ which is light mode.

I wish the colors on notepad++ were a little darker, and someday I need to figure out why the stock gentoo color scheme looks the best to me, and try and recreate it elsewhere.

I think universally light when using a projector! But maybe nowadays it's remote or big LCDs...

Same here. I work in an office with lots of daylight and dark mode makes it actually very hard to see.

Also, light theme allows for more distinguishable colors.

I’m actually moving to an extreme because of the busy colors on the screen attracting distractions, high contrast white on windows with Color Filters on grayscale. It’s like reading a newspaper. Now I just need to increase the window frame borders for the touch screen and it looks like eink

In my opinion, dark themes are for when your monitor's brightness is set too high.

I always struggled with loving dark mode, but I usually keep my brightness as low as tolerable without straining, and your comment made me wonder if it's related I do like dark mode if I'm working in a super dark room though

That's exactly why. A lot of monitors don't go dim enough for darker environments, so we make them even dimmer by showing a mostly black picture.

I love how this went viral because of this thread lol. I do know some friends who prefer light mode too, so maybe an opposite effect of forcing your light-mode-fan opponent to code in dark mode? Dunno lol

You’re not alone. I do the same, but often I keep the text editor in dark mode but the rest of the system on light mode to help provide contrast.

Dark mode is difficult to read for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com