I liked the idea of a fediverse. If a distributed pocket|delicio.us|etc existed, all comments in these sites could be aggregated by the canonical url where comments are. Moreover, you could reply-to between instances, right?
In my own personal and subjective experiments, I came to the opposite conclusion. Light themes rock. Some of friends who did similar tests complained about their eyes hurting. Upon checking it out, we realized that the problem was not really the light theme but the display brightness and the colorscheme. People often mix light theme with “LET’S BLIND THE USER WITH A WHITE BACKGROUND!” and their brightness set to supernova levels. That doesn’t work at all.
Light themes is not about them being white, it is about choosing lighter shades. The sweet spot for me is pastel colours. Choosing subtle pastels made my editor of choice much more pleasing to use. A good example of pastel interfaces are old HP Vue and CDE screenshots. Yes, there were dark themes for them, but most themes were towards the light part of the spectrum. Plan9 also makes good use of pastels.
I advise people not to be turned out from lighter themes by this post, try it out for yourselves, but for for subtle shades, not for high contrast white backgrounds. Heck, the linked theme is using #ffffff as the background, that alone will make your eyes hurt a ton. Remember most of your screen real state is background, choose a pleasing tone.
I like this post. It’s well written and useful, but I don’t wholeheartedly agree with it. In many cases I agree that configuration files should be simple, particularly if you have a broad target audience. Sometimes the complexity using a full programming language is warranted. Sometimes you have a target audience who can spend a lot of time and effort on configuration. Sometimes you want to make a tool like Emacs or Conky or Awesome. Sometimes you want to make systems which are malleable (see https://malleable.systems/).
Interesting point. Yes, there are different end users. For advanced cases, I guess you could use extension hooks or plugins?
Plugins are a way to change the behaviour of the program through code that the author of the program did not write.
Then in a config file you turn on/off these plugins.
This way, config files are still universally applicable… Only advanced users go deeper if they need it, the rest of the userbase is not overwhelmed by a programming language or DSL..
I liked the idea of a fediverse. If a distributed pocket|delicio.us|etc existed, all comments in these sites could be aggregated by the canonical url where comments are. Moreover, you could reply-to between instances, right?
When Richard Stallman is mentioned I always remember this xkcd https://xkcd.com/225/
In my own personal and subjective experiments, I came to the opposite conclusion. Light themes rock. Some of friends who did similar tests complained about their eyes hurting. Upon checking it out, we realized that the problem was not really the light theme but the display brightness and the colorscheme. People often mix light theme with “LET’S BLIND THE USER WITH A WHITE BACKGROUND!” and their brightness set to supernova levels. That doesn’t work at all.
Light themes is not about them being white, it is about choosing lighter shades. The sweet spot for me is pastel colours. Choosing subtle pastels made my editor of choice much more pleasing to use. A good example of pastel interfaces are old HP Vue and CDE screenshots. Yes, there were dark themes for them, but most themes were towards the light part of the spectrum. Plan9 also makes good use of pastels.
I advise people not to be turned out from lighter themes by this post, try it out for yourselves, but for for subtle shades, not for high contrast white backgrounds. Heck, the linked theme is using #ffffff as the background, that alone will make your eyes hurt a ton. Remember most of your screen real state is background, choose a pleasing tone.
Yes I love a nice pastel – I was vibing with #ffffef for a long time. Plan9 has the best pastel scheme.
Also +1 to turning down the brightness – I have my screen at about 30% unless I’m outside in the sun.
Thanks for this reply soapdog! I have honestly been trying out light modes in everything for months, on and off, and this is nice to know!
Well said
I think that the problem with federated services is that they focus too much on the technology instead of the content/community.
I like this post. It’s well written and useful, but I don’t wholeheartedly agree with it. In many cases I agree that configuration files should be simple, particularly if you have a broad target audience. Sometimes the complexity using a full programming language is warranted. Sometimes you have a target audience who can spend a lot of time and effort on configuration. Sometimes you want to make a tool like Emacs or Conky or Awesome. Sometimes you want to make systems which are malleable (see https://malleable.systems/).
Interesting point. Yes, there are different end users. For advanced cases, I guess you could use extension hooks or plugins? Plugins are a way to change the behaviour of the program through code that the author of the program did not write. Then in a config file you turn on/off these plugins. This way, config files are still universally applicable… Only advanced users go deeper if they need it, the rest of the userbase is not overwhelmed by a programming language or DSL..
I can get behind ideas like that :)