I use only dark schemes for programming and is way more relaxing for my eyes.
One of the reasons is that the minimum brightness of my screens are just too bright compared to ambient light at night, and I love my ambient light at night, that is quite bright but illuminates all the room, so I can work on the room, and use things like blackboards or notepads, not just the computer screen.
It hurts my eyes to have white rectangles at the middle of the night so higher than the environment.
Those screens are supposedly high quality and they can be way too bright in order to compete with the sun, but not dim enough for low light places.
Dark themes let you have letters with higher visual contrast as all colors contrast with dark way more than against white.
It is a complex issue with multiple variables, not just one.
BTW I don't see science anywhere in the article. Science needs you testing your hypothesis with actual experiments and collecting data.
If it's true that the minimum brightness is still too bright, that's an easy fix.
If you're on a Mac, there are several freeware utilities to do exactly that, Shady was at one point the most popular. I assume there are similar utilities for Windows and Linux.
They work by lowering the RGB intensities of all the pixels on your screen, instead of lowering the backlight further. It has exactly the same effect in the end.
It doesn’t have exactly the same effect: you get lower contrast. When you reduce the brightness of the backlight, blacks and whites alike become less bright. When you reduce the RGB intensities, the whites become less bright but the blacks stay just as bright. How big a deal this is depends on the technique. On OLED panels there’s approximately no difference, but it’s a huge deal in low-light scenarios with most LCD panels.
I just tried it on my MacBook Pro in a perfectly dark bathroom to double-check.
Yes... at minimum brightness #000 isn't pure black, it's a very, very, very dark gray.
But nevertheless -- there's still plenty of contrast. So while it's technically true you get slightly lower contrast... I don't see how, in practice, this would be a problem for anyone who's simply doing reading/writing/coding.
(Remember, many coding themes are intentionally lower-contrast anyways -- black text on white is really dark gray, bright text on dark background is a dark gray background. So it's doubly not a problem.)
One of the reasons is that the minimum brightness of my screens are just too bright compared to ambient light at night, and I love my ambient light at night, that is quite bright but illuminates all the room, so I can work on the room, and use things like blackboards or notepads, not just the computer screen.
It hurts my eyes to have white rectangles at the middle of the night so higher than the environment.
Those screens are supposedly high quality and they can be way too bright in order to compete with the sun, but not dim enough for low light places.
Dark themes let you have letters with higher visual contrast as all colors contrast with dark way more than against white.
It is a complex issue with multiple variables, not just one.
BTW I don't see science anywhere in the article. Science needs you testing your hypothesis with actual experiments and collecting data.