How many of you use light or dark mode or both?

[PlainName]

Having just had to read a white-on-black page it occurs to me that another problem with that is that the small in-character space (like the hole in 'e') is harder to see. We can detect minute amounts of light, but lack of light is less easily noticed. Which is presumably why monitors with dead pixels are allowed whereas one with permanently on pixel wouldn't be. So white letters, particularly at small point size, tend to blur because the dark parts are hard to see, whereas black letter are sharper because even a tiny space is noticeable.

[brucehoult]

Since I spend most of the day in CLion and shell, my preferred colour scheme is black on blanched almond. Font is Monaco Regular, to answer your next poll question.

I'm pretty similar. In GUI emacs or xterms I use "wheat" (F5DEB3). My MacOS Terminal background is ... let's check ... 255 241 180 aka FFF1B4. Both are not a million miles from your blanched almond.

I stopped using Monaco when Profont came out in 1987, but depending on what I find myself using similar fonts such as Consolas (Windows) or Ubuntu Mono are ok too.

[thm_w]

I think people who don't like light mode either have inferior displays, or simply have the brightness turned up WAY too high.

Maybe some, not all, its just different physiology. I use dark with brightness levels down to 5% at night. Though % is highly monitor dependent, some older/cheaper monitors on 0% brightness are still bright, to the point of requiring modification. Modern OLEDs are better.

BTW brightness should also vary throughout the day, bright in morning, dimmer at evening, very dim a few hours before sleep.
You can achieve this with app I linked before: https://twinkletray.com/
Completely different from f.lux which changes color temperature only, not backlight brightness.

[MrMobodies]

I was looking for some settings in Firefox to come across this and thought I'd see if it helps solves the problem I experience so much that strains my eyes.

Dimming overlay changed to light overlay by the browser via setting:


Looks like those at Mozilla working on Firefox have done really well here.

An option to control the background which can be very handy for situations where he background of a modal/dialogue has oppositing colours and can overwhelm one's senses if excessively changes. Still don't like the background covered in principle up but I'd prefer that over a dark one (in normal light mode) and I can still read things.

Thank you very much to those responsible for this setting.
Never expected them to do something like this.

Light mode linked to light/white overlays.
Dark mode linked to dimming/dark overlays.
I find that just makes sense if it was done automatically but now manual controls for this implemented in the browser.

Very pleased and happy about this too, twice in two days.
Now hopefully from this point I won't be inundated by flashy overlays with that set to white.

Imagine if it was the the other way round for dark mode users.
Where in dark mode the background turns white instead of darker.

Which is why I thought it might have been a preference set by those working on web design in dark mode and they didn't forsee they effect the rapid screen changes can have for someone viewing their webpages in normal light mode when these modals or dialogues appear as for my reason for starting this poll to find out whether  there more dark users than light users.

Quite interesting reading all your views and experiences and I see that everyone's eye conditions are different as for their choice.
 
Thank you very much

[Ranayna]

And i use light modes whereever available.

But, I have dimmed the brightness of my screens, and i also use windows "night light" at all times, set to 20.

[...] But shells need to have a black background [...]

With shells i am somewhat with you. But i wonder how much of that is just inertia and "it was always done this way".
Because i remember, many years ago, a windows telnet terminal program whose name i have forgotten (not PuTTY or related), that indeed had black text on white background. And i did not mind that.
I think i need to experiment a bit with my PuTTY settings

[madires]

Could be custom as the old terminals (CRTs) and terminal programs usually have a black background. Just tried XTerm's light mode (enable reverse video, Ctrl + middle mouse button) switching to a light grey background. At first glance it looks fine to me, but some ANSI colors, e.g. yellow, are hard to read. Light mode will only work when not using ANSI colors.

[Ranayna]

Could be custom as the old terminals (CRTs) and terminal programs usually have a black background. Just tried XTerm's light mode (enable reverse video, Ctrl + middle mouse button) switching to a light grey background. At first glance it looks fine to me, but some ANSI colors, e.g. yellow, are hard to read. Light mode will only work when not using ANSI colors.

Good point about colors. But that is rarely applicable to my use. I use putty for devices with custom command lines, like various networking appliances. Those don't use colors.