Rubenerd

Beryl sent an email in July, to which I’m only just getting around to replying because I’m a terrible person:

Hi Ruben! I hope you are doing well. A very random question, I have noticed that you seem to use light mode in most of your devices, is there any important reason for that or did you try dark mode and just did not like it?

I definitely prefer and use light mode when I can now, but it wasn’t always the case. It’s funny how our preferences and requirements change over time.

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I used to be ambivalent when it came to modes, and use whatever the tool I was using had without a second thought. Before I started school, I’d hack on the family 486 which was either booted into DOS for QPascal and WordPerfect, or Windows 3.1/95 to run GUI software. The former had what we’d now call a dark mode, and the latter two mostly ran in light mode. But I never stopped to wonder if I could change these. DOS would have let me with the appropriate ANSI.SYS calls, and Windows certainly had their themes.

rubenerd@ami.lan:~ $

In my twenties, this changed alongside my shift towards Linux, then BSD and Mac OS X. I used light modes on the desktop, but my Terminals took on the familiar green-on-black “phosphor” look. Likewise, my first GeoCities pages used a white-on-blue theme, because I thought it looked like XTreeGold and Borland tools. Then I got access to a Solaris box and saw its light mode dmesg(8), and loved that too. Go figure.

SPARCStation 5, Keyboard Present
ROM Rev. 2.15, 64 MB memory installed
    
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With my older eyes however, I’ve had to retire dark modes. Looking at dark mode displays for more than a few moments burns whatever text I can read into my dilated eyes, such that it ghosts across my vision when I blink or move my head. It somewhat mimics the early-onset aura symptoms of a migraine, which isn’t ideal! I also tend to find dark themes much blurrier, especially if I’m not wearing glasses at my desk which is my preference.

rubenerd@aino.lan:~ 
ready $

There’s also a mood aspect to it as well. Light themes feel more cheerful to me, especially now that I live in a part of the world that experiences winter again. For all the stereotypes of nerds sitting in dank basements with dim lighting and Matrix-style displays, I’m a hopelessly solar-powered individual. Light means warmth, joy, and optimism, and I’ll take it whenever and wherever I can.

All that said, is a phrase with three words (thank you). I’ll continue to include dark modes on my site here, because we all have different eyes. One of my close friends claims to find light modes overwhelming, and likens black text on a white screen to ants crawling across a light bulb. That also doesn’t sound ideal, and is potentially a sign that food wasn’t properly cleaned somewhere. Sterling Archer warned us about this.