UX changes: dark theme, distinct borders and shortcuts

I'm photosensitive and bright white backgrounds bother me too. Dark-mode themes tend to fail me in other ways, so I usually try to soften the bombardment of bright white pixels instead. In case it helps, I'll share my workaround. This is the CSS override I use, with the Stylus add-on, for Codidact sites:

@-moz-document domain("codidact.com") {

.is-12 {background-color: #FDF9F0; }
.is-8-lg {background-color: #FDF9F0; }
.is-4-lg {background-color: #FBEFD1; }
.has-margin-4 {background-color: #FDF9F0; }
}

You can adjust those colors to suit your preferences.

If I recall correctly, there are some transparent backgrounds in play too, and this doesn't catch those. In addition to using Stylus to make per-site CSS adjustments, I've also set a default background color in my browser. You can do this in Chrome and Firefox at least; I don't know about others.

These changes don't get everything; in particular, this doesn't catch the white background in the top bar, but since I'm not usually trying to read lots of text there, that's ok for me.

Here's a screenshot of what this looks like:

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Monica Cellio‭ staff

64 372 2259 828

Dark theme is something I'd like to do, but right now it has to take a back seat to developing the features that we want to have. Creating and maintaining a dark theme is a significant amount of work, and not something we have the development time for right now. Once we've got all of our basic features, we'll be able to have another look at adding a new theme.

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

ArtOfCode‭ staff

9 151 811 244

Horrible hacky dark mode

Until there's a real dark mode, here are some quick CSS hacks that you can try out in the developer window of your browser, and add to a userscript or user stylesheet if you like the results.

The site as it currently looks

With no CSS changes, here's the starting point:

Inverted colours

With the following CSS every colour is swapped with its opposite, with the exception of the background which remains at the default white (unless you have overridden your browser's background colour):

body {
    filter: invert(1);
}

Background colour set to black

The parts of the page where the background colour shows through can be overridden in CSS:

body {
    filter: invert(1);
    background-color: black;
}

Rotating back to familiar colours

This leaves the page readable but with inverted colours. Rotating the hues brings them back to the expected colours, but still keeping light and dark swapped:

body {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn);
    background-color: black;
}

Reducing contrast

Although this looks like a dark mode, you may find the bright white text uncomfortable. You can reduce the contrast to 50% (or whatever percentage you prefer) to make this less harsh:

body {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn) contrast(50%);
    background-color: black;
}

Increasing contrast

You can also increase the contrast above 100% if you wish. This will not affect the white text on black background, which is already the maximum contrast your screen can display, but it will exaggerate the other colours, giving you that oversaturated smart phone look even when viewing on your desktop:

body {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn) contrast(300%);
    background-color: black;
}

Dark mode only when signed in

Sometimes I want to take a screenshot to raise a bug or feature request, so I need the site to appear the standard way without being affected by my user stylesheet. My hacky way of switching back to light mode is to open the same page in a private browsing window, so I'm no longer signed in. The following CSS will only work when I'm signed in (replace 53890 with your own user id):

body[data-user-id="53890"] {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn) contrast(80%);
    background-color: black;
}

This isn't guaranteed to continue working with future updates to the site, but as a temporary hack it does what I need.

If you need to take a screenshot while still signed in, you can also untick the CSS on the <body> tag in the developer window.

Making Exceptions

As Moshi points out in a comment, this also makes images have the same dark/light inversion, which may not be desirable.

You can reverse the filter for all images using Moshi's code:

img {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn) contrast(125%);
    background-color: black;
}

This will make user avatars look roughly how they were before the original filter, but will also reverse the filter for screenshots of the site, which can make posts containing screenshots have large areas of white. If you prefer to keep screenshots in dark mode and only reverse the filter for user avatars, you can use this variation:

.user-card--avatar {
    filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(0.5turn) contrast(125%);
    background-color: black;
}

Decreasing the contrast in the original filter, and then bringing it back up in the reverse filter, leaves the image corrupted but still recognisable. If you instead choose to apply no contrast change in either filter (just the invert and hue-rotate) then the original filter followed by reverse filter will be lossless and restore the exact original images.

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

trichoplax‭

222 74 715 297