But I get that there are a lot of opinions. Just try one, put up a vote over a week, do it over 4-6 weeks, settle on the one that has the best feedback...
I like it, in fact my standard terminal font size is even smaller. I hate all the modern websites wasting tons of whitespace, so that you need to hit C-- ~3 times to make it usable.
It's too damn small. Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px (as does Chrome I think), and even then I zoom in to 130% to get the font to 15.6px.
On the home page the text that tells you who the poster is, how many upvotes and comments, etc, is gray text on a gray background, at 7pt font. Again, Firefox and Chrome scale this up to 9.33pt, which again, is too small for me to read comfortably on a 24 inch desktop monitor without zoom.
(I accept that 120% would be fine; that brings up the main font size to 14.4pt. Wikipedia seems to use 14pt and that's totally fine for me. But still, neither me nor the browser should have to scale up the website.)
Even at 130% zoom, on the home page I can see 20 posts at once. I understand complaints that reddit went too far in the other direction, but that doesn't mean they should throw accessibility out the window for this site.
The OP isn't really asking for a "dark mode" like a literal reading of his comment might suggest. He's asking for an officially supported dark mode that evolves with the site and doesn't break random functionality one day. It's easy to use Stylist or TamperMonkey to make a dark mode that works at one instant of time. It's much harder to maintain one indefinitely in the face of constant changes made by developers not concerned with breaking your work, which they probably don't even know about.
I think there was a vision early in the evolution of the web that user-supplied stylesheets would be a lot more commonly used than they turned out to be.
Things like colors, contrast levels, font sizes, are often matters of personal preference, and the browser (in theory) is the common place to manage those. Each site should not have to reinvent this feature.
I don't read HN in normal browsers. If you read the RSS feed and click through, for instance, it's instant white flash from the embedded browser in the RSS reader, which cannot be customized but honors dark mode.
uBlock origin filter:
Does not work in embedded browsers in RSS readers. We need a proper site CSS, not client-side patches.
Sounds like you need to write a CSS translating proxy server.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062
That thread is 5 years old, and nothing really came out of it.
The genius solution in there is probably this one:
...which you can try by doing this in the browser console:
But I get that there are a lot of opinions. Just try one, put up a vote over a week, do it over 4-6 weeks, settle on the one that has the best feedback...
That thread is 5 years old
This might be what we are up against:
https://norvig.com/21-days.html
https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html
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I use the awesome “Dark Reader” browser extension, which gives you dark mode on any website.
Does not work in in-app browsers.
Considering Hacker News thinks font-size:9pt is acceptable for body text in 2025, don't hold your breath.
This is what cmd +/- is for
I like it, in fact my standard terminal font size is even smaller. I hate all the modern websites wasting tons of whitespace, so that you need to hit C-- ~3 times to make it usable.
whats wrong with that?
It's too damn small. Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px (as does Chrome I think), and even then I zoom in to 130% to get the font to 15.6px.
On the home page the text that tells you who the poster is, how many upvotes and comments, etc, is gray text on a gray background, at 7pt font. Again, Firefox and Chrome scale this up to 9.33pt, which again, is too small for me to read comfortably on a 24 inch desktop monitor without zoom.
(I accept that 120% would be fine; that brings up the main font size to 14.4pt. Wikipedia seems to use 14pt and that's totally fine for me. But still, neither me nor the browser should have to scale up the website.)
Even at 130% zoom, on the home page I can see 20 posts at once. I understand complaints that reddit went too far in the other direction, but that doesn't mean they should throw accessibility out the window for this site.
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Can't you use tampermonkey or a similar tool that lets you apply your own stylesheet?
The OP isn't really asking for a "dark mode" like a literal reading of his comment might suggest. He's asking for an officially supported dark mode that evolves with the site and doesn't break random functionality one day. It's easy to use Stylist or TamperMonkey to make a dark mode that works at one instant of time. It's much harder to maintain one indefinitely in the face of constant changes made by developers not concerned with breaking your work, which they probably don't even know about.
I think there was a vision early in the evolution of the web that user-supplied stylesheets would be a lot more commonly used than they turned out to be.
Things like colors, contrast levels, font sizes, are often matters of personal preference, and the browser (in theory) is the common place to manage those. Each site should not have to reinvent this feature.
14 replies →
None of those extensions work in app-embedded browsers.
I don't read HN in normal browsers. If you read the RSS feed and click through, for instance, it's instant white flash from the embedded browser in the RSS reader, which cannot be customized but honors dark mode.
Which RSS reader do you use?
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There is an API somewhere, could wrap that with whatever you feel like.
That’s not really the point, my RSS reader’s in-app browser couldn’t deal with that.
Ask your browser for the reading mode
That does not prevent a big white flash in the middle of the night, and does not work inside all in-app browsers.