I just made a donation to the Dark Reader project over on Open Collective. If you haven’t seen it before Dark Reader is a browser plugin (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari) that lets you enable dark mode on websites that don’t support it. It has lots of useful configuration settings, and allows you to easily turn it on and off for particular web sites.

For most of my life I’ve actually preferred light backgrounds for my text editor. But for the past year or so as my eyes have gotten worse I’ve enabled dark mode in Vim and gradually in any application or website that will let me.

I’m not an eye doctor, but it seems that the additional light from the screen reflects off of whatever material constitutes the cataracts in the lenses of my eyes, which causes everything to fuzz out, and for text to become basically illegible. Being able to turn on dark mode has meant I’ve been able continue to read online, although it still can be difficult. Dark Reader lets me turn on dark mode for other websites that don’t support it, which has been a real life saver. So it was nice to be able to say thank you.

Just as an aside, I’ve been using Open Collective for a few years now, to donate regularly to the social.coop project which is how I’m doing social media these days. Realizing Dark Reader was on Open Collective too made me think how I should really look at more open source projects to support that are on there. It also made me think that perhaps Open Collective could be a useful platform for the [Documenting the Now] project to look at to support some of the tools it has developed, as the project draws down on its grant funding and moves into sustaining some of the things it has started. Perhaps it would be useful for other projects like Webrecorder potentially too?

PS. It’s enabled here on my blog for people who have their browser/os set to dark mode.