Over the years I have seen various applications where having a dark mode or theme was an optional extra. Something which could be charged for as a desired feature. This feature had never really interested me, I felt that it was primarily just a fad, something to make a developer look, or perhaps just feel like they looked, that little bit more cool. This was certainly something I could manage without, being comfortable with my own level of coolness.
At present, my IDE of choice is Visual Studio, I have used different versions of it for a number of years and feel comfortable with it. I have probably used no more than 10% of its features and I’ve certainly never invested any significant time customising it. For myself, out-of-the-box seemed good enough.
Perhaps it has come with age, or perhaps just wear and tear, too many long days and late nights, staring and an overly bright screen with a white background, but recently I had noticed I was struggling to differentiate some of the styles being applied to my code within the IDE. Code blindness!
With my recent upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 I thought perhaps it was time to take a few moments to customise the IDE for my personal preferences. I will confess, I didn’t know that I would even have the option for the dark theme but there it was, so, hesitantly, I selected it.
Whilst it is still early days and I may find reasons not to like it, I have to say that the higher contrast between font and background colours is of huge personal benefit.
I plan to remain in my little bubble of ignorance, not wishing to know how long this feature has been available to me, or how much easier things could have been for all of these years, as my eye-sight progressively worsened. I’ve been using Visual Studio since .Net 1.0 was released, rather scarily, that was 17+ years ago. It’s quite incredible how long some people will just make-do.
My transition to the dark-side so far has been an easy one, I hope it will come with acceptance from those cool kids who already use this feature, those with a superior desire-to-fiddle mentality – and 20/20 vision.