no offence my friend, even when i did not understand the joke. I am completely respectful of the people who find it hard to work with a dark theme and I always stated that Pharo should have both, ideally ever more themes. Of course we don't have the size of the community to do that. Ideally Pharo could offer the choice at welcome screen but to be fair to devs its super easy to change it, a couple of clicks away. Light theme definitely wont go anywhere , which one is more popular is not really my point and frankly it does not matter both of them have quite a large following and its great we have them both in image. If we want people to love Pharo then we have to accept that each person has it own preferences and sometime its for good reason like eye strain. I am definitely a big defender of choice , after all my theme has that as a feature ;) I suspect dark monitor may have been an energy issue. Another issue is that back then monitors were CRT and there was actual radiation that affected the eye. For example my monitor was making my eyes seeing things pink for a while till my eye rested. It may have been the green color. I remember my glasses even came with layers specialised to reflect some of the radiation and it actually helped a bit. On the other hand bright themes did emerge at the time of window 3.1 and of course we still had CRT monitors so you may be correct and it was mainly a energy consumption issue. I simply dont know, life tends to be appear simple , but alas its far from it :D On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 12:24 AM Alistair Grant <akgrant0710@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Dimitris,
On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 08:37:56PM +0000, Dimitris Chloupis wrote:
I completely agree - dark mode is great for content that you want to look cool, but no one consumes. :-)
I actually meant this in jest, which is why it has the smiley face afterwords.
I don't know which is more popular, light or dark themes, I'm glad that Pharo makes it easy to automatically change to which ever one prefers - which was what the code following this sentence was demonstrating.
You assume wrong cause dark themes have been dominating GUIs for over 3 decades now. Pharo was the rare exception of using a white theme. Light themes may be popular but white are definitely not. The web is the last fort of bright themes, but the web was and still is eons behind when it comes to matters of UI.
My first computer was black background with green fonts, black back in 80 and 90s was pretty much the norm. There was no white or bright themes back then. It was not because the monitors had any issues with displaying white.
I had my terminals set to black background with green fonts up to last year since that is what I was used to from my Dick Smith System 80 (TRS-80 clone). :-)
Going slightly off topic: I suspect terminals used a dark theme by default because a light theme would burn out the CRT. If I remember correctly, DEC VT-220's had a light theme (which I didn't use).
It was actually the web that made white a thing. Probably inexperienced web coders (there were no web devs back then ) thought it made sense transitioning from paper. Problem is that paper , reflects light, does not emit it.
White or dark is a matter of preference. But the matter of preference is also a matter of biology . Not all eyes are same. Some eyes have hard time distinguishing elements in dark environments , others have hard time distinguishing elements in bright environments but excel at dark environments. I belong to the second case as such white themes for me are pretty much unacceptable for any content I have to read for a long time.
My monitor as we speak is set to 1/16th of its brightness which is the minimum setting. During the day that sun goes in my room it goes up to 3/16 maximum. Above that I am forced to simply reduce the light in the room.
Trying to use Moose especially that was even brighter it was even harder for me to the point I gave up and never used it since then.
So yes there are many of us who were raised with dark themes, still use dark themes , will continue to use dark themes and criticise any app that does not support them. For me the Dark theme has been the most important improvement of Pharo and I am not exaggerating one tiny bit.
I largely agree with what you've said. My eyes have just deteriorated in the opposite direction - I can't read with a dark theme (my terminals are now dark text on a white background).
My apologies for any offence, it wasn't intended.
Cheers, Alistair