Most of the world consists of dark objects against a light field. Written letters made with a pen were dark on light for a couple of thousand years. Your scheme is the inverse one.
Yeah the hate for light mode is very badly overstated. It's fine to prefer dark mode, but that doesn't mean light mode sucks in some kind of objective way.
No, it isn't. You need to go back and look at the history of modern computers, especially personal ones. The standard color scheme was light text on a dark background. Many used white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible. Even after Windows dominated, Word had a checkbox in its settings labeled simply, "Blue background, white text." That setting existed well into the 2000s, and it may still be buried somewhere. Edit: Looks like it was finally removed sometime around 2016; here's one of several posts I found complaining about its removal: https://eileenslounge.com/viewtopic.php?t=36503
Computer makers and users referred to black text on a white background as inverse video. The Atari 8-bits even had a key to toggle between normal and inverse characters when typing (the Atari-logo key). It's even described in the manual: https://www.atarimania.com/documents/atari-800-computer-owne...
To quote the manual: "Inverse video is text being shown in dark letters against a light background."
Then came the "desktop publishing" craze and some attempts to make video screens an analogy for a piece of paper. This fails because paper does not EMIT light. Nor is reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day a good way to work. Useful for previewing printed output? OK. For all work on a computer? Not so much.
And yet, perhaps in an effort to be "different" from character-based systems, GUIs migrated to inverse color schemes as their default (except for Apple's, which was always inverse and offered no color-scheme management... and still doesn't).
Throughout all of this and into the current day, applications that focus on art, photography, and video & visual effects have implemented a so-called "dark" UI. That's not coincidence.
I've never understood the complaints about glare, I don't know what's causing other people to have that experience. They talk about screens as if they were staring at the sun, with apparently no access to a brightness control. It might be some new super-bright screen technology that I haven't encountered yet, or an epidemic of eye sensitivity, I don't know. Can you, uh, shed any light on that?
> white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible.
Was that really the reason, though? Where did they get that idea? I see variety in the 8-bit computers. Many booted into white or green on black, such as the Commodore PET, but the Commodore Vic-20 was blue on white. The ZX81 was black on white, the Amstrad CPC (Color Personal Computer) was green on blue.
I remember that green-screen word processors were sold as reducing eye strain, when really the reason was that green and amber phosphors were cheaper. That's incidental to the inverse video question, but it throws some doubt on the idea that it was more legible. There may have been some technical motivation.
What are you talking about in the final sentence? Photoshop, for instance, didn't have a dark UI, and as you observe, desktop publishing imitated paper, and art programs would fit into that.
