From Newsgroup: comp.misc
On 2026-06-01, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
On Sun, 31 May 2026 14:31:48 GMT, Jan Panteltje wrote:
But using white as background has the advantage that the average
brightness is more constant, so eye needs to adapt less. I text
changes.
If you're using white as background, either your eyes enjoy a lot of
brightness or you're doing things in a suboptimal way. Although I
concede a lot of platforms and sites make this hard, white, as a color,
should be fully representable, and light backgrounds should be made of
less bright colors, in order to preserve the ability to display brighter
ones where needed.
It's funny, it seems this is only done with *dark* backgrounds, where
for some reason there's frequently a sort of insistence that you can't
have black, only dark-colored. But given some people need the background
to be absent of color to read better, and that others need it to avoid
halo effects, it's an argument to avoid anything as limiting as "just
two themes" and offering all these options. (Although it's probably also
the case that some of these affected by halos prefer light backgrounds).
Also means the text remains readable at lower contrast overall.
With white text on a black background, you need to set the white
intensity higher, and this leads to eye fatigue after a while.
Also see if you can use something like redshift, if you haven't.
I'd argue the problem overall here really stems from using white
backgrounds, instead of more sensible choices (one remarkable one is
#d4d0c8, which reportedly was part of more carefully chosen colors, it's
the UI color of Windows NT 5.0).
Some web browsers and UI toolkits also defaulted to some sort of gray.
This is why, as soon as display technology made it practical to move
away from old-style white-on-black towards something more like a sheet
of paper, everybody made the switch.
(Maybe you're using these names more loosely here, but you'd also not
use white as foreground, you'd use something softer. The above mentioned #33ff33 was what somebody™ somewhere™ mentioned as close to DEC VT
green. White, if anything, would be reserved for stuff like bold. At
least some "monochromatic" terminals can do that as well, bold is
increased brightness, as is standout compared to reverse video.)
--
Nuno Silva
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