With all of them going gaga about Dark Mode everywhere, is there anyone else at all who thinks light mode is so much more easy on the eyes during the day alone at least?

Dark mode is for people who want to be as cool as CLI folks, but don't want to give up on usability.

I do prefer light themes in most cases! Actually, I'd like to get outside a bit more, and dark themes are damn hard to read on older laptops in sunlight.

Honestly, even at night, just let flux crank up to its maximum. I'd presume it's a lot easier on your eyes and your sleeping routines than having a dark blue theme.

The issue with switching to light theme when it's day is that I don't recognize all colors 🤷🏻‍♂️

Beeehaaaaaa.... (Barfing sound)

@Fast-Nop If you think GUI=usability you're doing CLI wrong. The whole point is that you can do something quickly and precisely, which is, arguably, more usable than what the abstractions of a GUI often require for the same tasks.

Both have their place, but I would choose a term other than "usability" as the differentiator.

@powerfulparadox I take it that you operate your smartphone via CLI and that you have found a way how to get Lynx working with devRant?

I prefer dark mode simply because I'm usually in a semi-dark to dark room working, most of the light provided is from screens. Hitting a suddenly bright white screen is occasionally quite blinding for a moment.

@Fast-Nop I did say that both have their place, didn't I? And, no, I don't, but I could. There exists at least one CLI launcher for Android and I have Termux installed which would let me run lynx if I so chose. (There are also CLI devrant clients, but I digress.) Besides, you have not explained how a GUI is inherently more usable than a CLI program, just presented a situation you imagine would be difficult. A CLI serves a slightly different purpose than a GUI does, sure. That does not make it inherently less usable. GUIs can be much more friendly to pick up in our visually-focused world, but friendly and usable are completely different concepts.

@powerfulparadox The main thing a GUI has over a CLI is discoverability. That's just usability 101. The drawback is of course lack of automation because GUI macros turned out to be a dead end for various reasons.

Liking dark themes doesn't make you cool.

Being the oddball that likes light themes doesn't make you unique or quirky.

Just use whatever the fuck you like and let's get on with it. Don't use one or the other just because it's cool or to be "different." It's your eyes, use what they tolerate better.

It's not rocket science y'all.

(Yes, I've had moments where I'm outside and I'll turn off dark modes so that I can see because between the sun and my sunglasses, the screen was dark.)

@Fast-Nop And the main thing a CLI has over a GUI is precision and speed, which are also usability 101. It's not a usability competition, and it never has been. Different things for different purposes, and comparing between the two is silly. Again, you can find a better term if you must contrast the two.

GUI macros are trying to do what CLIs were made for. Of course they failed. CLIs rarely try to do what GUIs are good at, so I don't have a good example to share of that.

@Stuxnet How dare you try to be reasonable amongst us fad-loving people!

@powerfulparadox ik, ik.

We use logic in our code so much that we forget to use it elsewhere!

I actually set my Java IDE to use a light theme and any other else to be dark themed, I somehow function better with light mode enabled when coding in Java...

@powerfulparadox actually, i have some, namely ffmpeg vs handbrake or imagemagick vs any image processing program. CLI gets really complicated (and really hard to remember) once you have loads and loads of parameters. magick and ffmpeg are great tools and work for simple things, but nobody would actually use them for complex tasks, unless in a headless environment.

@git-gud ffmpeg/handbrake is not a good comparison because they are doing different things. (ffmpeg does the encoding, handbrake helps the user manage the settings, presets, and file details that are then passed off to ffmpeg. Handbrake is designed to complement ffmpeg, not complete with it.) Imagemagick is a graphics processor, not an image editor (which is probably what you meant by "image processing program") and, while it certainly can perform a lot more than it would be wise to do with it, again it was designed for an entirely different purpose (making straightforward modifications to image files as part of a unix script pipeline). It's not trying to be the CLI Photoshop or anything similar.

The whole point of the Unix philosophy of software is "have programs be good at one thing" and chain them together via scripting or GUI frontends as necessary. Perhaps you didn't intend to illustrate my original point, but I, at least, consider them to be complementary examples.

This shit again 🤨
Why can't we have both?

@Fast-Nop there is a headless FF you know.. With all the js, cookies and bells with whistles.

Just ftr

@C0D4 shhhhh logic bad reee

@Stuxnet sorry 😔I should go have coffee and argue about le light.

@netikras Yeah no wonder given how headless Mozilla is.

@C0D4 rile em up and throw in some spaces v tabs while you're at it.

Now go get em young blood 💪🏻

@Stuxnet How do you even call whitespace in a dark theme? Blackspace?

@Fast-Nop tan whitespace

@Stuxnet Ah with desert camo theme, sure.

@Fast-Nop How about just "space", space is dark. and cold. and uncaring. and lonely... I think I got off track somewhere...

@Fast-Nop for sure.

@CptFox it isn't empty anymore. Actually it's full now that we can watch cockroach porn in 4k!

Yes. My desk is next to a window, using dark forces me to look at myself and I don't want to do that.

@Jilano shh, they'll come for me with pitchforks.

I hate how this whole thing is blown out of proportion like it's something completely new and unheard of. Yes, desktop OSes still haven't got it consistent enough, but it's been a thing on mobile for ages - Android 2 was mostly dark, it was Android 5 that started experimenting with light themes. As of now, I think that a totally black theme works well with OLED displays in most cases.

As for looking at code, it's not about light vs. dark (IMO #FFF is as bad as #000), it's more about contrast. I've grown to like medium gray themes (my current one is Laracasts from the Rainglow pack for VSCode) - I think it strikes a good balance between being neither too washed out nor too flashy. My problem with light themes is that for the different terms to be discernible, colours need to be flashier and fonts - bolder; it just doesn't work for me with the fonts I like. And to people who complain that light themes are too bright - do you keep your monitor at 100% brightness all the time?

@kamen Light themes don't need bolder fonts - they need proper contrast like every theme. Bold fonts are a bad workaround for lacking contrast, especially with this grey-on-grey pseudo minimalism.

FG/BG contrast has to be 4.5:1 at least. For main text, a minimum of 7:1 is strongly recommended. That's a11y 101.

@Fast-Nop Maybe it's an optical illusion then.

Dark theme when looking at text/code for a long time.
Light theme to visualize a few things.

Ex. I have a putty session called "presentation", 14 size and black text on white background. I use that when collaborating with multiple colleagues on one screen. But by myself it's easier on the eyes with default settings.