> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.
During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.
The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
Books reflect ambient light. Monitor brightness should be set to a similar light level. You can hold a book next to the display and adjust accordingly.
That's an unreasonable ask. I'm not gonna fiddle with the brightness of my monitor throughout the day, thanks
If you control your ambient lighting or use automatic adjustment, you don’t have to.
I can count on one hand the number of monitors I've seen with auto brightness. The number of monitors with acceptable and non distracting auto brightness is zero.
I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.
> Books reflect ambient light.
Thanks! I always wondered how books worked.
> I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light.
Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
> During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm.
Yes, because they were physically unable to do anything else! A pixel could be either 100% off (black) or 100% on - and if you were unlucky the "on" was something obnoxious like bright green. The fact that basically everyone switched to light mode once it became feasible should be a hint that it wasn't just a designer fad.
> easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power
The sun is orders of magnitudes brighter - even when it isn't a blue-sky day. Human eyes evolved to deal with that without any issues (that's why your pupils can vary in size), so a desktop monitor shouldn't be a problem.
The problem is contrast. If you sit in a dark room with your monitor turned to 100% brightness and you're using a light theme of course your eyes are going to hurt. It's the same with those obnoxiously bright headlights we're seeing on cars these days! Sure, you could use dark mode, but the problem can also be solved by making sure the room is properly lit, or turning down the monitor's brightness. No need to pretend dark mode is a one-size-fits-all must-have solution for "ergonomics".
The same applies the other way as well, by the way: in my experience dark mode becomes completely unreadable in a brightly-lit environment - especially on glossy screens. You're constantly dealing with annoying reflections hiding your content.
Personally I've grown fond of the way MacOS and Android handle it: automatically switch to light mode while the sun is up, use dark mode during the night. It's not perfect in every situation, but 99% of the time it gets me what I want.
> Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
I do! And here's dark mode feature for one of them[1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
> Plenty of ebooks with built-in illumination, you know.
If your screen has built-in illumination then you might want to use a white-on-black theme. Mostly everything supports it, txt readers, epub readers, pdf readers (pdf.js not yet, but other pdf readers).