A universal dark theme

Alright, even though last time in my post about working in the dark, I did mention that I will try to do my stuff with some ambient lighting near me...but in reality, that is just not too practical in my place. The only thing close enough will be a desk lamp with a yellow bulb that probably takes up more electricity than my laptop does, and of course I am not willing to pay the extra electricity fees that might come up. Turning on the lights also seem to cause trouble, since it is just too bright and the lights are not warm enough to me (indeed, I crave for warm light at night). So, right now I am actually typing in the dark, hands on the keyboard and eyes closed, because why look at the screen when you can type blind?

Windows 10 comes with a night light feature that you can tweak in the settings app, and on maximum settings it can provide a colour temperature similar to the sunset. Now I'm using it, and it indeed helps to make you feel sleepy and avoid insomnia due to the amount of blue light coming from your screens, and hence reducing eye strain too. Sure, it is good, but there's still one thing.

Some web pages are still trying to blind me with white backgrounds. Even Steemit is blinding me with that huge white text box on the compose page...lmao.

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I would say that this is the biggest thing that stops people from working in the dark, because looking at white stuff from a light source is just like...getting shot by some Ultraman's laser right in the eye, and it is not easy to solve.

For apps, you can hope that the app comes with a proper dark theme and it works well with your eyes. Meanwhile for the computer, you can use the dark theme on Windows 10 to make things better (including night light, not going to cover the steps to enable them here but Google is just a step away :3). But for other stuff like websites and local programs, it is just tricky or downright impossible. For example, you cannot change how Microsoft Office works...right?

I spend a lot of time on webpages, so that is what I concern on the most. There is something called "userstyles" that allows you to tweak the appearance of certain websites on supported browsers (most modern ones do), but they are site-dependent and might just break at any time. There are several addons or extensions for browsers that make use of this tech to change websites into dark themes automatically, but most of them are not smart enough to not break things at the same time. You want an example of them breaking something? Uh...like not solving the blinding input box on Steemit, or just give a super ugly black-white alternating look that hurts the eye even more.

But, I said "most". Otherwise why would I use this post title?

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Dark Mode to the rescue

I stumbled upon this one when searching for "dark mode" on Firefox's addon site. Well, I found it as a Firefox extension, but there's a Chrome version, so Chrome fans you can try the exact same thing too.

I didn't really captured images on how other similar solutions failed to provide a proper dark mode for most of the web, but I can show how this one does its job. Textboxes, background, etc, it literally changes everything to make the entire page look better in the dark.

Steemit

Google

Github

Wired

And who said that Busy does not has a dark theme?

It just does its job cleanly and nicely for most of the things I use :D

Of course, there are cases where it broke things or make things worse. Mainly, userstyles cannot change images, so if images are white, they will remain white. So when there are white images miixed with textboxes inside or something like that, you will still get an ugly site like this.

Interestingly, it does literally nothing on the new Reddit site. Wow.

It also breaks DuckDuckGo pretty well. Like, what is this...

It gets solved if I use DuckDuckGo's built-in dark theme, but then those ticks that show beside links after you click on them will be shown regardless you clicked on them before or not. Guess I will just add it to the whitelist then.

One of the good things of this extension is, you can switch themes and choose the dark theme that fits you the most. Probably you think that the one I used is too dark? There's a bunch of greyish ones. And there are colours to add flavour to your sites, too.

Right, addon pages cannot be styled.

In short, you go the dark side with your own way :)

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Until now, this is the best extension I found to do its job of giving every website a dark theme. Of course, there are flaws because every website is designed differently and hence are expected to behave differently. Still, I can't find a better one and will still highly recommend it to anyone that craves for more dark theme on their screens, like me :>

You can get it here, available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

See you at the dark side :3

--Lilacse