Feature unannouncement: dark mode 😕

[tom]

We just pushed a change that will affect a small set of users who have enabled Dark Mode: in particular, Dark Mode’s going away.

Alas, we couldn’t find a nice middle that would confer the eye-saving benefits of editing on a dark background, but not place new requirements on notebook authors - like the need to design dark charts. We want Observable to be flexible and feel like a well-honed tool, but sometimes those things are in conflict - so in this case we want to devote time to making the default color scheme great instead of being split.

So - I hope folks understand the rationale behind this call. We’ll keep the dark mode setting around in the database, so that perhaps once we hire some élite designers, it will make a comeback.

[xixixao]

@tom You could take inspiration from successful dark mode addition to Excalidraw. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/pull/2006

We used a filter trick that might simplify your chart problem (although I’m sure it is not a perfect solution).

[dunstan]

Thanks for sharing your work xixixao. I don’t think we have any plans to work on this, but I’ll send it to the design team regardless as it’s interesting to see what you did.

[mootari]

I agree that offering dark mode would be a huge pain for notebook authors. However, I got curious about what can be achieved with user styles, so here’s an SVG filter that inverts luminosity while preserving hue:

Inverted Luminosity

The notebook also includes an example of applying the filter to an embedded notebook.