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Which Tildes Theme are you using?
Personally I'm partial to solarized dark since I also use that in my IDE's usually.
Dark but not too harsh, since tildes supports a bunch of themes by default.
I'm wondering which one are you using and why?
I'm using the default because I forgot that Tildes has themes.
This is a good argument against (too much) configurability.
It's fine. If I didn't like the default I would have looked for a way to change it. It's an argument for good defaults and I think Tildes is okay there.
It might be an argument for automatically detecting dark mode if the user has it set in their browser.
I'd definitely like to do that eventually, and there's an issue for setting it up: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/307
It's a little tricky because the way Tildes's themes work (changing a class on the
<body>tag) doesn't map directly to how the CSS feature works (applying an alternate set of styles), and it's also a little weird since there are a bunch of different options for both dark and light modes instead of only one of each.... how? How is this an argument against too much configurability? Please justify your position.
Because even highly-active, highly-technical users like skybrian often don't bother to check which options exist, and will almost always use the default site appearance and behavior instead of looking to see what settings are available for adjusting it.
You can see this constantly on reddit in places like /r/help, /r/redditmobile, etc.: people will often be more willing to write a post complaining about some behavior they don't like than even look in the settings to see if they can just disable it. There are so many posts like, "how do I get rid of these annoying notifications?!" where the first response is just, "go in your settings and turn them off."
There isn't much value in configurability when almost nobody takes advantage of it or even realizes it exists. It can still be nice to have, but improving the defaults is always far more impactful.
I don't think I do that, but I will sometimes do a search to find out how to change something, only to find that it's in the logical place under settings.
So, I guess that's fine as long as settings have good SEO or someone asks about it in a searchable place.
Anyway, we all just got a reminder that Tildes has themes and other people do seem to use them.
Oh, I didn't meaning for it to come off as blaming you, or even as a particularly negative thing.
I just thought it was a great demonstration of how important the default experience is—even users that are obviously very high up the "involved" scale still don't necessarily fiddle around in the settings, so it's important to be careful that the site's behavior doesn't rely much on it.
Fair enough. I would point out that something like theming is an accessibility concern, though (especially for those of us sensitive to bright displays), so please don't take away my black theme. For something like this, I'm not sure you can improve the defaults for someone has a genuine biological / psychological problem with anything but a specific setting, unless the default happens to be what works for them. I couldn't sit in front of a SunOS console, for example, because it'd sear my retinas.
I'm the kind of person who always opens the preferences / settings when logging into a new site / opening a program for the first time, because my preferences typically deviate from what the developers set as defaults. This is why I'm so concerned about discussion of removing preferences: I'm concerned it will make software that I like (possibly much) less useful (or even unuseable / useless) for me.
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and Dracula is one of the lights, the light of all lights.
It looks great and has great contrast. Many of the other dark themes feel to me like they don't have enough contrast. I feel like I'm looking at the site through a filter. I know there's a lot of love for Solarized Dark, and I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but that one is almost unreadable to me!
Gruvbox Light, Dracula, and Zenburn...depending on the machine and time of day.
I'm not totally satisfied with any of them, as I prefer white text on a dark grey background rather than the seas of blue we get with the dark themes as is, but the situation has gotten better as time goes on which I've really appreciated. For the longest time, the only theme we had which I could stand was Solarized Light.
Is there a specific theme available elsewhere that you like? It's very easy to add new Tildes ones and doesn't take long at all if there's already a theme specification somewhere with the colors to use.
Hm, it's hard because with the named themes I know of they're typically for like consoles and such where I'm not sure what exactly translates to "link color," which is the main concern.
I can name websites with it, though, if that helps. Something simple like DDG's Dark theme is similarly a wall of links but displays them as white rather than blue in a way that's much better for me.
I'm sure this is an easy fix with a custom style, I just haven't put in the effort to learn how yet :P
Yeah, and links don't need to be a special color (usually blue-ish normally and purple-ish for visited ones), but it can be more complicated for a site like Tildes than one like DDG because the locations of links aren't as "standard".
That is, in the DDG results you already generally know which parts are clickable links. But on Tildes, links can be more or less random words in posts, so if the link color doesn't stand out from the normal text color they can be difficult to distinguish.
As long as we're taking requests, something similar to the Matrix or an electronic typewriter, (lime green text on dark green/black background) would be kind of interesting to have. Don't know if it would be used that much, (even by me) but if it's not any trouble, I would like to try it out.
I'm not that guy, but I'm a big fan of Nord theme myself! They have a few colour schemes all with a blue-ish tint. It's really simple, elegant and slick in my opinion and I hope you consider the theme!
ETA: Here's the direct link to the colour pallets with the hex codes and all if you're interested.
There's actually been an issue on the tracker specifically for Nord for a few months now: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/565
Nobody's taken it on yet, but I'm sure someone (maybe me) will eventually.
Mildly offtopic but would adding a menu to make your custom themes on tildes be too hard? In the end letting people make their own themes would give you one less thing to worry about, even if it's an insignificantly small thing.
It would be possible to do something like that, but it wouldn't be straightforward to set up. The theme system works by "compiling" CSS rules out of each theme's colors.
For example, this is what the definition for the Zenburn theme looks like:
Collapsed, click to view
So it defines the colors, then assigns them to different purposes in the theme. Then the site compiles a bunch of CSS rules out of that, applying the colors in all the necessary places. So if we wanted to be able to do it through an interface on the site without completely revamping the theme system, it would probably need to do a similar sort of thing and compile a user-specific CSS file in the background after they choose the colors. That's possible, but would take some work to set up.
...I clearly didn't understand anything since I don't do anything with code.
What's stopping me from inputting whatever hex values I please into the 'basic monochrome colors' and 'accent colors' segments in the code and you from making a page where we can do just that and plug values into the variables?
There's nothing stopping it, but it's not a simple process and would need someone to do a significant amount of work building that feature, and it'll probably end up being used by like... 3 people.
If you just want to adjust some colors, you could also use an extension like Stylus (Chrome / Firefox) and change them through that. It doesn't need to be built into the site, you can already apply your own custom CSS to any site through extensions like that, and it's not hard to do.
Atom One Dark.
My general theme preferences, in approximate but probably not exact order of priority, are
Of the remaining candidates—Atom One Dark, Zenburn, and Gruvbox Dark—I like Atom One's colors the best.
This is the same for me, right down to reasoning.
Me too. Feels nice on the eyes, very clean, and has the right amount of contrast.
Black. I like dark dark themes. I find the usual white text on dark blue background a bit hard to read. And white themes are horrid.
Deimos could probably pull up some stats here.
If there were a dark purple theme I would totally use that though, purple is a sick colour.
+1 for purple!
I'm not ace, but I absolutely adore the color scheme of the ace flag. I feel like it could be used as the basis for a great purple-centric dark theme.
Ive been messing around with some CSS (read copy pasting and changing hex values) and I made a purple theme. Its very purple. I might post it when im done with it.
I used to use the regular night theme, but for the last few months I've been using Gruvbox Dark. It's not much, but the warmer colors actually make a surprising amount of difference.
Black. Some others hurt my eyes. Solarized dark is not dark enough, same for the other dark themes.
Also, the black theme seems to have the most contrast among dark themes. So far, Black is the best for me.
Same. But, to me the background says "parchment", rather than "newspaper". And "parchment" feels classy.
There was a survey with this question and I think solarized light and dark dominated. It was deleted and really old though.
Is she still around? That's good news! She had major health issues, and she even hinted she might not be around much longer. When she vanished from Tildes, I assumed the worst. I'm glad that hasn't happened (but I do hope she's not suffering too much).
I can't really get meaningful stats on it. The theme someone is using is set in their cookie (so it can be device-specific), and I don't track anything about that. I can check which ones people have set as their "account default", but that's not necessarily what they're actually using, and also won't include logged-out users.
Here are the account defaults for accounts that have taken some kind of action on the site in the last 30 days:
I use solarized dark but for whatever reason it keeps getting reset to default every week or two on different machines.
Judging by the comments here nobody else seems to have this problem.
Your theme choice is mostly stored in a cookie, so if you have something on your devices that's clearing your cookies out periodically it will get reset whenever that happens. You can fix this though: go on the Settings page, choose your theme, and then a link/button should appear next to the dropdown that says "Set as account default". If you click that, it will set as the default theme for your account, and whenever you're logged in it will default to that one on every device instead of always going back to the white theme.
It might be a little fiddly if you've already got the theme selected that you want to use as your default—you might need to change to a different theme first and reload the page or something similar.
Solarized Dark for life. It's perfect for my eyes. Just dark enough, not too dark.
Solarized dark. Mainly because I like blue and teal colors, and because the labels have a stronger hue and so highlights the comments more, which is what a label should do.
White is... bright on dark text, and the titles and links with blue on text don't work for me and reminds me of those ancient Web pages that lack anything on the background or foreground, which I do not like.
Solarized and gruvbox light have that old bleached newspaper-y feel which I don't really like and wouldn't want to emulate in a webpage. (and gruvbox light is almost yellow, which I really dislike.)
Dracula is pretty good but most of the icons are a little too light and any smudge on my glass makes it unbearable. Atom one is quite similar to Dracula and shares this judgement.
Zenburn is like Dracula but with the newspaper bleach effects which I already said I dislike and make it particularly pale.
Black and gruvbox dark are probably my favorite themes so far, but the headers in black are far too greatly contrasting.
Gruvbox dark is actually pretty good though, the effect works far better with the pale yellow text on a brown background than the other way around in light.
I use white.
When I’m using a black app or website it becomes really annoying to use a white app after that.
For me to adopt black themes I would need to have each of my apps and sites on a black theme to avoid getting blinded.
Until that I just use white themes with low bright.
I had no idea Tildes has themes, but I like the Dracula one. Good contrast on a dark theme.
Dracula because it matches the Arc theme on my Linux setups, even if Black would match Firefox more.
Dracula on both mobile and desktop. For me, it's still the most readable theme of those available.
It's closest to the preferred contrast ratios for accessibility (there's a good explanation here).
It's great to have an "out-of-the-box" theme available which takes into account the possibility that users might have some degree of impaired vision, rather than just a desire for lower luminance to read in the dark comfortably.
Black is a little too high-contrast, Solarized, Atom One, and Gruvbox Dark not enough, but Dracula is exactly light enough that I rarely have to switch themes or crank up brightness at the expense of battery life when reading outdoors.
Solarized dark. I like dark themes, but with enough colors to make things stand out.
It's so awesome that Tildes has native themes. More websites should be like that. Stylish work for some people, but usually I find the themes ugly. There are aesthetical gains in using themes made by the actual developers.
@Bauke's "Baukula" as a userstyle. I find the Tildes native Dracula theme to be a bit too dark for my taste.
Solarized Light. It's as close as I can get to Terminal.app's "Novel" or Xcode's "Sunset". I'd prefer the text to be just a bit darker, but I'll take what I can get.
The default theme, like I do on most applications and websites.
The default theme is usually the one that developers have put the most effort into, so it's often the best theme, and usually the one with the fewest bugs.
And honestly, I don't get the whole dark mode fad. Dark mode makes me squint.