Give yourself to the Light Side

Okay, I might lose a lot of geek cred for admitting this, and will never be able to hold my head high again in a hipster coffee shop. Here it is.... I use the light theme in visual studio

Before you judge me (I know, too late). Let's bust the myths

"Dark background uses less energy, it is the green thing to do!"

Actually no, unless you're using an OLED screen, Most LED screens use less energy with white pixels than back ones. There is a DELL OLED that has been announced, so yeah, once they're out, and you have splashed £5000 on one of those, then dark wins - energy wise.

"Fine, white backgrounds hurt my eyes more"

This might be true if you spent all your time in the dark, but when I code I am constantly switching to https://www.google.com, http://stackoverflow.com, maybe looking up some documentation on https://msdn.microsoft.com. Then when I take a break I might read a tech blog or simply just waste some time. Now you might notice a common theme with these sites. Yup, white backgrounds.

Let's analyse what happens.
When you look at a dark monitor, the rods in your eyes start forming rhodopsin, this take about 10 minutes to form, next you flip to one of the above sites, and it takes 10 seconds for the rhodopsin to flush out (also this is the "ouch bright light" process, and if you're like me, you'll have the after-image of the dark screen you just looked at). But you adjust quickly, then flip back to your dark screen... and... now wait 10 minutes for the rhodopsin to form again.

"Okay, well, with the dark screen, I look like a cool computer hacker!"

Well you see, in reality...

Alright Mr. Straw Man! I'll give you that one.

Photo credit https://www.flickr.com/photos/132889348@N07/20013034763