Legibility of Big Sur UI

[kewms]

I haven't installed Big Sur yet, so I can't comment on it.

For Scrivener's Dark Mode generally, though, my own personal preference is the Solarized Dark Theme, but using approximately the color scheme of the Solarized Light Theme for the main editors. The "beige" paper is much less blindingly white than the standard "Light Editors" option.

Katherine

[mbbntu]

An alternative to HazeOver is Finer Focus, which possibly gives you greater control over what you see and how you see it. (Not sure whether it runs in Big Sur.)

http://www.cool-mac-tools.com/index.html?full=true

Thanks for that -- that one is new to me. UnDistracted is another possibility.

[mbbntu]

Aaand ... having tried dark mode I cannot stand it! About thirty seconds was enough. I can't see a thing nor understand what I'm looking at.

I'm going to suggest you look at dark mode again, and tweak your colour settings a bit in Preferences:Appearance, using the greyscale sliders in the Colour Picker. The reason? Scrivener's Default theme has full contrast (100% bright for background, 0% bright for text) in Light Mode, but in Dark Mode the contrast is lowered significantly (about 20% bright for background, 100% bright for text.) In general, Scrivener's default Dark Mode settings have lowered contrast and desaturated colours (you may not be able to see the latter, but it also has the effect of lowering contrast a bit more.) If you have Night Shift enabled for your monitor as well, that too will lower overall contrast as white shifts more to yellow, thus becoming darker.

I have all your vision challenges save colour blindness, and I cordially dislike Scrivener's default Dark Mode. TBH, I don't much care for Dark Mode even if I "roll my own" theme, but Scrivener's is particularly difficult for me to read. The other Dark Mode themes provided have even less contrast.

This is not to suggest you should use Dark Mode like all the other cool kids! I surely don't. But part of the problem, at least for me, is the lower contrast and colour definition that results from Dark Mode, which Scrivener's default theme makes worse. Night Shift is the final nail in the coffin. it's worth taking a look to see if tweaking the theme contrast clears your difficulty (it didn't mine, or not enough, but YMMV).

And yes, I've given Dark Mode, with and without Night Shift, a good long try. It's not like I didn't put in my time reading monitors with black backgrounds and bright (white, green, amber... take your pick) text. I like Light Mode better.

Thanks for the tips. I'll have a look at some point. At the moment I'm in a research phase, so I'm spending most of my time in DEVONthink and Safari. And I do tend to make use of Solarised light where I can. I just find adapting to light on dark is very, very hard for me. And I'm not sure what the benefits are (if there are any).
Cheers!

[devinganger]

I just find adapting to light on dark is very, very hard for me. And I'm not sure what the benefits are (if there are any).

This is a good overview of the pros and cons of dark mode vs. traditional light mode:

The benefits of dark mode

[xiamenese]

I haven't installed Big Sur on my iMac yet … I'm going to wait yet awhile, though I'm wondering about trying to instal it on an external SSD to test it out.

On the other hand, I find apps in dark mode almost unusable … my 75 year-old eyes just don't get on with it. The only things that I am comfortable with are: (a) light text on a dark background when reading on my iPad at night, though its automatic switching at sunset—which seems regularly to turn itself on even though I turn it off in Settings—is a complete PITA; and (b) a black "lightbox" in photo editing, though I prefer the controls and menus to remain light.



Mark

[AmberV]

I haven't installed Big Sur on my iMac yet … I'm going to wait yet awhile, though I'm wondering about trying to instal it on an external SSD to test it out.

Have you played around with the new options for volumes in APFS? In the past you had to partition your disk to make multiple boot volumes off of one disk, and that was always with a degree of risk and stress. But with the new file system you can make "floating" volumes basically, they only use as much space as they need, and can be easily added and deleted on a whim. The end effect is identical to an external drive install or partitioning, but without the hassle or added expense.

Now on to the matter of how unreasonably difficult and geeky the procedure is to perform a proper OS install on a fresh new drive, or to upgrade to a clean system and bypass the typically messy in situ upgrade procedure...

[xiamenese]

I haven't installed Big Sur on my iMac yet … I'm going to wait yet awhile, though I'm wondering about trying to instal it on an external SSD to test it out.

Have you played around with the new options for volumes in APFS? In the past you had to partition your disk to make multiple boot volumes off of one disk, and that was always with a degree of risk and stress. But with the new file system you can make "floating" volumes basically, they only use as much space as they need, and can be easily added and deleted on a whim. The end effect is identical to an external drive install or partitioning, but without the hassle or added expense.

Now on to the matter of how unreasonably difficult and geeky the procedure is to perform a proper OS install on a fresh new drive, or to upgrade to a clean system and bypass the typically messy in situ upgrade procedure...

Thanks Ioa. I'm not feeling very geeky at the moment and I have a lot of other things to do which more than fill up my time, so I shall continue to wonder for the moment.

The SSID on this iMac is only 500GB and as I use it for video editing with Final Cut Pro X, whose library files can be enormous, I need to preserve as much space on the drive as I can, so a "floating drive" would go against that.



Mark