It all started, effectively 2 years ago, with this tweet.
I’m not sure when I started following Brent on Twitter, but he posts interesting stuff about Laravel and PHP, and I’ve learned a bunch from his blog. Sometime last year he tweeted this and as I dug deeper into the conversation, I realised something. I had, up until a few years ago, been a strong proponent of light themes.
But somewhere along the line, I was tempted by the dark side.
I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but it was recent, since about 2016 or so, that I switched my PHPStorm IDE from a light to a dark theme. I think it was when I first installed the Material Theme, and it defaulted to a dark theme. I’m not sure if I kept it because it was better, or because I was lead to believe it was better, but I’d been using it ever since.
Over the past weekend, I upgraded my workstation to the latest Ubuntu release and one of the new features of the OS is a built in dark theme, so I tried it, and hated it.
On Sunday (exactly 2 years on from the original tweet!) I was thinking about this, and I realised that there are only two places that have a dark theme; my terminal, and my IDE. Everything else I use daily has a light theme. My text editor, my Slack instance, even my browser, is using a light theme. And I got to thinking that every time I’ve tried a new dark theme (in Ubuntu, Slack, Twitter) I’ve hated it. So why am I keeping to a dark theme in the two applications I probably use the most, after Slack and my browser.
So I decided to try an experiment. I switched PHPStorm back to the IntelliJ light theme, I switched my terminal to a light theme (Tango light), and I gave it a day to see if it made a difference.
It’s now been two days like this, and I’m surprised to find that I have not noticed any negative differences. In fact, I’ve found the text in PHPStorm and my terminal more easy to read, and therefore it feels like I comprehend what’s happening quicker. As I’ve always kept my monitor brightness and contrast settings low, it appears I’ve actually been working in a sub optimal way now, for at least 3 years!
Light themes FTW (again).
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