Automatic light/dark theme
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I don’t see why it doesn’t auto swap between light and dark based on if you are using the light or dark mode in windows / night mode on phones
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Why not? Some people want full customization. I've got dark android theme but white discord theme. But automatic time based switching as an option would be great so my eyes wont burn late at night!
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On phones discord can toggle dark mode according to whether dark mode is enabled at the system level, the developers should introduce the same principle on Windows (which has a system-level dark mode).
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Yeah, but I'm talking time based not what the system is.
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It's pretty simple to enable both I'd of imagined, light, dark or auto, with auto respecting system wide settings. Given as windows has a "night light" feature that changes the colour by time, this would provide a nice solution that doesn't create a weird non colour consistent arrangement.
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Night light just removes blue from your screen during specific times to reduce eye strain, it does NOT change the windows theme from light to black...
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having the option between time based and system based would also be amazing. this waay i can have everything i use synced up to avoid burning my eyes at night. uwu
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Support.
I have a tendency to switch to light mode in the day because it is very hard to read it in the sun or bright places on my phone and to dark since it's bright at night.1 -
I get that positive contrast (light legend on a dark field, aka dark mode) is all the rage these days, but for many of us, negative contrast (dark legend on a light field, aka light mode) is an important accessibility feature (easier on the eyes to read) by day. At the same time, in darker ambient lighting, common in the evening and at night, light themes produce a lot of blue light, which has been shown to disrupt many people's sleep cycles. Dark mode goes even further than color shifting toward red, by brute-force suppressing the amount of any light the screen produces, with all the black or otherwise darker backgrounds.
Because of this, both Apple and Microsoft (possibly Google, too) have developed operating system-wide options to automatically switch between light and dark modes at sunrise and sunset, or perhaps even setting a custom rule for those of use who might be starting our day before sunrise.
Discord should be able to support this switching as well.
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They should have it just follow the system theme if they want to be lazy about it. The only OS that doesn't support automatic switching out of the box is Windows, and even then there's plenty of ways to add it that also work on a schedule.
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Color Mode Options should be:
- Dark (default)
- Light
- Auto (Sunrise/Sunset)
- Auto (Follow System)
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Thanks all for posting about this, it's great to see dark/light mode getting more attention! Circadian rhythms and eyesight wear and tear have significant effects on wellbeing and dark/light mode can help with this.
I believe the following three options will cover the majority of use cases:
- Dark
- Light
- Auto (Follow system)
One can easily automate the windows settings to follow sunset, and Discord can simply follow suit [1].
IMHO there unlikely to be significant user demand for automating light/dark mode for discord on a schedule different to that of the system.
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mikearoo The way to use the builtin Windows theme as a guide and the task manager to toggle it is really clever! I'm not sure how that would work across platforms. I've done some googling, and macOS seems to have this built in already. And as other people mentioned in the thread, most mobile operating systems already have this.
This only leaves Linux in a bit discordant state (no surprise there). But I still think there's a solution, but with a few compromises/limitations.
So, probably the easiest thing for Discord on Linux would be to simply piggy back on the GTK theme in Linux; GNOME has an extension for automatic theme switching already (there's plenty of others that allow for quick theme toggling as well).
Other desktop environments (or lack thereof) will probably still have some GTK theming available to them (since a lot of apps use GTK), so they could have a cronjob script for switching to a different GTK theme. So, even power users could benefit from this with a few extra steps.
There are other alternatives which are more portable than relying on the GTK theme, but they are probably overkill since the GTK approach will cover most use cases (Ubuntu being the most popular distro out there, and it's been using GNOME Shell for a while now).
What's debatable[1] is how to determine which theme is light and which is dark. Some newer/modern themes implement variants. Variants are an arbitrary string, but most themes come with `light` and `dark` variants, though. So matching on the variant string is probably a good enough heuristic, I think.
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[1]: The reason why I say it's debatable is because I'm not sure about the adoption rate of theme variants. A lot of popular GTK themes are old, and I've no idea how recently theme variants were added, nor whether those older themes switched to them variants.
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There is also https://github.com/Darazaki/AutoDayNightThemeSwitch for GNOME. Anyway, both Firefox and Epiphany (GMOME Web) correctly detect system theme. For Chromium there is an issue on the tracker. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme could be used
Since on desktop Discord is a web app running in Electron,
systemPreferences.isDarkMode()might be enough once support is added for all platforms.
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How does Discord still not support auto-switching based on system color scheme?
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I completely agree. Even Chrome supports automatic theme changing. Telegram and other programs too.
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Sync with system seems to work on web and Windows as of the latest update.
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