GitHub Releases Dark Mode

Nice to see but it&#x27;s too contrast-y for me compared to the stylus theme I&#x27;ve already been using which honestly looks better <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark</a>

Wouldn&#x27;t [the blog post)[0] be a better link then the settings panel?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2020-12-08-new-from-universe-2020-dark-mode-github-sponsors-for-companies-and-more&#x2F;#dark-mode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2020-12-08-new-from-universe-2020-dark-m...</a>

Good dark themes are generally softer than this. This is way too dark. Also, the identicons (default avatars) look out of place in dark mode.

The emoji skin tone customization preference is a small thing but as a POC I really appreciate it. Never knew they had it.

Having tried it for a few minutes, I prefer the light theme.<p>I also reverted back to light themes for my text editors - I felt it was easier to focus on dark-on-light text than the other way around.

About a year ago I was trying to figure out how important dark mode was for our app so I created a poll on Twitter and linked to it here on HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;Dark-Mode-Should-Be-The-Default-With-95-Percent-Preferring-it-Over-Light-Mode.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;Dark-Mode-Should-Be-The-D...</a><p>The idea being, if you were FORCED to pick one, would you rather have light or dark mode.<p>90% preferred dark mode with nearly 1000 votes.<p>That blew me away honestly.<p>Before that I thought that dark mode was a &#x27;nice to have&#x27; but clearly I was wrong.<p>The other issue isn&#x27;t just dark mode but &#x27;true black&#x27; mode for mobile devices and OLED. True black just looks better on mobile devices.<p>Most dark mode skins can usually be converted to true black but you have to make sure the fonts don&#x27;t become too strong.

Github and Hackernews are two of the only light-themed websites I&#x27;ve left that way.<p>I got too used to them, and have tried putting dark themes on them but it just looks &quot;wrong&quot; now.<p>Humans are weird.

Owners of repositories that &quot;assumed white background&quot; (for example, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jenkinsci&#x2F;jenkins" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jenkinsci&#x2F;jenkins</a>), consider updating your graphics to something that is readable in both styles.

It appears the default is light mode, rather than system preference. For those of us who use websites logged out most of the time, this is a bit annoying. Hopefully the default is changed to system preference in future.

Excellent! That&#x27;s one more site I can disable in Dark Reader.<p>Edit: spoke too soon. It&#x27;s not available in their enterprise edition yet. <i>Re enables Dark Reader for corporate url.</i>

Not to disregard dark theme users, but dark sites always look the same to me. Light color schemes still feel distinct in subtleties like fonts, border colors and other things that scream “you’re looking at github” or “you’re looking at msdn” or “it’s your iphone”. It doesn’t happen with dark mode, it’s just all the same dark bg with some text. Idk what can be done to fix it.

If only they can read my dotfiles and create the theme just for me! ;)

The default Github repo view looks amazingly good. It has changed some during the years but the base design is still there. I think many people choose Github over other web based repo views just because of the design. I don&#x27;t think the dark mode can live up to it though, it still looks good, but not amazing.

It&#x27;s interesting to see how they did it and pros&#x2F;cons of their approach. In general the page look like it&#x27;s built server-side. Some parts use lit-html but they are just a few and I believe they are not using webcomponents or shadowRoot.<p>Custom css properties are used to personalize colors, which would also work with shadowDom.<p>background-color: var(--color-menu-bg-active);<p>These custom properties are declared in light.scss and applied to the body, using the selector [data-color-mode=&quot;light&quot;].<p>This method is fairly standard and widely used in modern websites. The only downside is that IE11 doesn&#x27;t support custom properties and, in my expierience, there is no polyfill or postcss plugin that is 100% reliable.

For once I have to actually say this looks better than the auto-generated theme from Dark Reader. That is rare. Good job!!

Wish HN had a dark mode setting as well.

Whenever I see something like this I always wonder how we came to allow website authors to dictate how their content is displayed on other people&#x27;s computers. I know I can use greasemonkey or whatever to hack something together (or stick to lynx), but why don&#x27;t websites generally just deliver text and leave the decision of how to render it up to me?

Anyone know a &quot;Material design spec&quot; for dark mode? I mean I&#x27;m no designer and I just want to copy paste some hex codes to make the apps I built support dark mode.<p>Dark mode sounds easy (just make the background black!), but I&#x27;m pretty sure there are more science to that, because many dark mode apps I&#x27;ve tried make me uncomfortable and I reverted to normal mode because it&#x27;s _easier_ for my eyes.

Completely irrelevant and more of an &quot;off my chest&quot;. I got lasik earlier this year from one of the most accomplished surgeons using the latest lasers. Anyway, I have a bit of &quot;haloing&quot; which is more apparent on black screens w&#x2F; white text, so now I barely use dark mode. I guess you never know the side affects you&#x27;ll get with elective stuff.

I have mild afterimage illusion when viewing text or high contrast images. Interestingly, the symptom is worse when background is dark than the other way around. So dark mode themes are mostly no go for me mostly unless some transparency is enabled. Of course, I can not use this github dark mode sadly at this state.

I like the idea, but super high contrast and dark for me, used for a few hours and reverted it to the old model.

Nice! Looks like an improvement over what Dark Reader gave me.<p>It&#x27;s odd that they have a skin colour settings for cartoon hands. Why not just stick to yellow and keep race out of it? Having that settings is essentially saying that race matters which I find offensive. I don&#x27;t care what colour your skin is.

Related question: why do most websites give you a light&#x2F;dark&#x2F;system toggle instead of always going with system? I’m having trouble thinking of any time I’d want the system dark but GitHub light, or vice versa. Is it just for systems lacking support?

Hopefully support in RefinedGithub ships soon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sindresorhus&#x2F;refined-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3798" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sindresorhus&#x2F;refined-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3798</a>

The coloring on diffs needs some work. The green is almost invisible with dark mode enabled.

Sticking to light mode in everything is more optimal:<p>- light mode is often the default, so you don&#x27;t have to work around it<p>- more readable: in the daytime, in text editors, for people with astigmatism<p>- using screen inverters like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mlaily&#x2F;NegativeScreen&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mlaily&#x2F;NegativeScreen&#x2F;</a> switches your whole screen to &quot;night mode&quot; - including the pesky details like taskbars, menu, etc, and offering you more fine control (ex: only keep the red channel)<p>Yes, even my terminal is in light mode (Solarized light) - at night, I just press on a key which immediately invert my screen colors and only preserve the red channels. No tweaking with a zillion apps to get them &quot;dark&quot;.<p>In the day time, I press on the key again and keep going with all the applications now &quot;light&quot;.

Finally. Really happy with it, except that the explorer&#x2F;trending and trending page hasn&#x27;t been updated yet. I hope that will follow to protect my eyes from that brightness contrast at night and in the morning.

next up hacker news?

Now I’m waiting for tomorrow’s news “Hacker News Releases Dark Mode”! :)

I think the only thing that remains blindingly white is now JIRA. Slack, github, and code editors support dark themes. Anyone know of a good mySQL editor that supports dark themes?

Whoa, this is really dark - even waay too dark for my taste.

I&#x27;ve used the Night Eye Chrome extension for a white and it does a great job of converting any website&#x2F;web app to dark mode.

The UI looks faster as well. I&#x27;m testing on a slow Chromebook, so it&#x27;s really noticeable. Well done, GitHub team!

Is it just me or does the activity feed still use a white background (and therefore almost unreadable) on Firefox?

Doesn&#x27;t seem to work on the &#x2F;trending page :(

Finally. There have been Stylus user styles forever, if GitHub was open source (like Gitea, which has dark mode enabled by default on some instances) they could have been merged in years ago.

Next they should release &quot;HTML mode&quot;, where the site is just HTML for people who get headaches trying to use sites that think they&#x27;re applications instead of documents.

It&#x27;s a large failure that individual websites and applications have to even bother creating &quot;dark mode&quot; skins, rather than using the user&#x27;s system color scheme.

Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I&#x27;d rather all these tech companies that implemented dark mode over the last year or so had worked on new features or bugs instead...

Finally! nice.

I wish they would undo the new ui entirely

Finally!

Hope HN will release it soon.

Omg it was about time!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.community&#x2F;c&#x2F;github-help&#x2F;dark-mode-beta&#x2F;65" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.community&#x2F;c&#x2F;github-help&#x2F;dark-mode-beta&#x2F;65</a>

Now if only HackerNews would relent in its zealous vendetta against eyes.<p>It&#x27;s appalling how such major apps and websites literally took YEARS to implement Dark Mode after OSes added support for it, while plenty of minor devs had their shit ready to ship during the betas of iOS and macOS.<p>If their elite teams can&#x27;t manage something as simple as an additional color theme, what confidence do they hope to inspire in their product? (then again most popular apps are actually crappy in other areas too; WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat etc.)

Why do sites need to &quot;release&quot; dark mode? Everybody can change their user css easily, and put whatever text&#x2F;background colors they want. The problem is that the css of most sites is an humongous monstrosity and does not cope well with a couple of simple changes (which was precisely the purpose behind the design of CSS!)