[COFF] White Backgrounds on GUIs after Dark Backgrounds on Terminals?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 05:33:24PM +0000, segaloco via COFF wrote:
> > As for the current light on dark, I wonder if this is just a new
> set of engineers making their mark. I'm sure it's better. The cost
> is the same, so now it's just marketing and a way to show off being
> different - e.g., new/cool.

But, there is also a benefit - we save the planet, or at least we
show. And, perhaps nowadays it is fashionable to hint that one is
a haxors. 

As of me, the first (probably) thing I do with newly installed system
is go through various options and choose dark theme that pleases
me. Otherwise I would be afraid of my eyes bleeding out of my head.

> That kinda gets at the root of what I'm puzzling on too.  At times
> where a dark color scheme would've had some, if even minor,
> technical benefit, it was stepped away from (as you said, Xerox is a
> paper company, that all makes perfect sense), however, now we're
> seeing the pendulum swing at a time where any amount of phosphor
> relief or other potential power savings from not driving visual
> content are lost on modern display technologies.

I would blame, in no particular order, fashion, marketing propaganda,
revolutionary new designs which want to be different from the
interfaces of dark era of computers, troglodyte gurus banging their
text into terminals versus hip guys delicately and finely soft
touching their ideas into colorful whatever...

In the past, I guess the reasons had more to do with economy, as Clem
pointed. Closer to today, I imagine it is all about being hip and
modern (as defined by the hip and the modern).

> And I'll be the first to admit the difference is probably
> negligible, it's not like I've done a power consumption analysis on

I recall some scientists ~8 years ago were able to conclude which
movie one was watching by measuring soft differences of electric power
eaten by monitor (changing patterns on the display resulted in
changing power consumption). So, yes, the electricity bill would be
almost the same (because the differences were really small and
detecting them required sensitive equipment, from what I remember).

But, perhaps things can be different with OLED - I understand it
shines only the pixels which are meant to shine. So, terminal
emulation with OLED should make a more visible difference, but then
again, leds draw so little energy that it may not really matter.

> > side tidbit - he has the patent on the loadable curser - which was
> > initially a martini glass, not an hourglass to show time
> 
> I was waiting for a work conference to kick off as I was reading
> this email, shared this tidbit.  Our resident COBOL/dinosaur era guy
> just remarked if programming at the time didn't drive you to drink
> there was something wrong with you.

I would like to believe times have changed.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **