Are dark backgrounds good for your health?

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I have the background color in my terminal on my Mac set to black, and I also have several emulators and virtual machines with dark backgrounds. I find these displays very relaxing and soothing to look at. White backgrounds interfere with my concentration, and sometimes even hurt my eyes. Often when I’m reading a PDF, I will reverse the colors on my display so the PDF is white text on a black background. It makes it easier to read that way, and again, it’s relaxing. I think dark backgrounds boost the endorphins for me. What about everyone else?

I can't read light fonts on dark backgrounds for more than a minute or so. It hurts my eyes and gives me migraines. It's so painful that I need to copy and paste the text somewhere else if it's long.
Same with brightly colored texts, but very often, I don't intend to be mean but the author needs a few web design lessons.

I have some colorblindness & dark backgrounds are easier for me to see.

With the correct font and background color combinations, you can relieve eye tension. I havemy computer ont he lowest brightness setting, and have had many settings as far as color combos go (I change a lot). I also have F.lux which adjusts computer screen lighting to the time of day to help one get better sleep at night. This really does make some difference as screen lighting can cause one to not sleep as well and also screen flicks per second can also hurt the eyes if set to low (I think it was recommended for one to want it around 70)

They were terrible in just about every other respect (esp. power usage and heat) but to this day I miss reading on a slow phosphor green screen. Crisp green on pure black. The kind where if you scrolled you had to wait a few seconds for the fade until you could read again. Most of them were just adequate but somehow I found a surplus one that was to be used in the PLATO project. Hours of viewing and no eye strain or fatigue. Sadly there is just no way to reproduce it on a LCD or even a color CRT. Then again, I hate subpixel rendering & the way it makes character edges have random colors. Still convinced that someday something better will supplant the 3-color LCD/OLED/etc. screens, but I'm not holding my breath.

So, yeah. I'm a big fan of reading on dark backgrounds. It even seems to help with the subpixel rendering. I set most of my editors to green on black if I need to read through large amounts of code, except for when I need contextual/syntax color coding.

Side note, reading at night with a bright screen *will* mess with your sleep cycle. Both CCD and LED backlighting have peaks that are close to our "daylight" / circadian receptors.

Love dark backgrounds. Have most of my apps set up that way with a GTK theme. Wear yellow glasses for screen work.

The fewer pixels going into my eyes throughout a day, the better.

The main exception is web sites, including this one. It would be nice, and also a friendly accomodation to a light-sensitive reader population, to give some options for how this site displays. Or am I missing something?

Everything I do on computers has to have a dark background, or at least a medium gray background. White backgrounds hurt my eyes (actually, all bright colors hurt my eyes, including the text), no matter if it's a website, pdf, or application.

I spend a LOT of time fiddling with themes, installing and using color management plugins, and looking for alternative applications when the ones I like don't allow the colors to be changed.

I use F.lux on my desktop and Twilight on my phone so I can dim the screen or tint it depending on the time of day and how bright the room is. Dark backgrounds do help increase the battery life of mobile devices too so its a win/win.

Personally I'm the opposite, I hate it when I'm reading a website that uses a dark background with white or pale text. it drives my eyes crazy and I usually leave the site. Sometimes I've even resorted to highlighting the text and reading it that way, or even copy-pasting it to Word and just reading the pasted piece.

On the computer or any other device where reading text is concerned, I prefer light backgrounds with darker text. When I'm on the computer I don't actually mind bright screens or pages, yet oddly when I'm outside on a bright day my eyes can't handle a lot of bright daylight (even though I actually like being out in it) so I have to wear caps and hats and sunglasses to shield my eyes. So, real life outside: brightness is too harsh, inside on the computer, actually prefer the bright screen and can't tolerate the white on dark texts.

"Burns into my brain and retinas" -- yes, that's exactly what happens to me! I find my eyes get a burn-in very soon after landing on, and trying to read, a website with black background and white or intensely colored text.

My preference is white or light background and black, grey or other soft hue text.

Light fonts on a very dark background are hard to read.....

I have my laptop on the lowest brightness possible, my eyes have always been sore before I knew I suffered pretty bad sensory issues (I just used to think well I guess my eyes are too sore 24/7) so I kinda get a double attack from any form of invasive light, I prefer dark backgrounds and dim light settings.

Surprised that some people have problems with dark backgrounds and light fonts, thought it was easier on the eyes. I use some add-on on Firefox to change to colors here, way too bright.