Why the Dark Background?

Once in a while I hear comments like “so, you’re one of those who like everything dark…”, as people look at how some environments are set on my computers. Those comments make me think about my reasoning behind that choice.

Of course, some people choose to go dark just to go with the flow (“That’s what the cool kids are doing…”). That’s not my case.

I’m getting old. This is what my screen used to look like when I started working with computers some 25 years ago:

The software I wrote used to look like this:

At some point, things started to light up and MS Windows brought white background to everything. As I worked with MS Visual FoxPro, and then Visual Studio, as far as I remember, white background was all we could use, so I got used to it, but I always felt it a little “too much” on the eyes.

Once Visual Studio allowed me to switch to a dark color scheme, I embraced it, and that’s how I’ve had it set for a long time:

I do the same thing with Gmail and any other tool that allows me to:

What about the other tools that don’t let me go dark? I don’t care, I just use them regardless. The important thing is that the tool where I spent most of my time is set to my liking.

And why do I prefer it dark? I do because it looks calmer as I read through the text.

  1. Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: