For me it depends and I am not entirely sure I understand why.
I use a relatively dark blue/green background in VS Code, with light, low saturation yellowish base color for the code. Before VS Code I used the same dark color scheme for 25+ years in Emacs. But this is for editing code where I have a bunch of colors that have a semantic job to do. The colors are a bit easier to identify precisely against a darker background. And I don't actually read code per se - I scan and orient by shape (formatting) most of the time. So editing code is very distinct from reading.
For prose/text I find it tiring to have a dark background. Not least because people get the contrast wrong because they don't know that it is different for dark backgrounds. And from an aesthetic point of view it strikes me as a bit ... well, demonstrative and perhaps childish. I'm sure this impression isn't shared by everyone, but that's the feeling i get.
And then there's what you can make work on the web.
(Interesting observation: I'm a big fan of what Erik Spiekermann says about typography - yet both the book he wrote for Adobe ("Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works") and a book about him ("Hello, I am Erik") have horribly annoying typesetting. One has horribly ugly guillemets that look like someone has taken a metal file to the type, the other has type in white-on-pink, which ought to qualify for a severe paddlin'. Is there a rule that whenever someone tries to write something about typography, things go wrong? :-).
One possible explanation might be in one of Spiekermann's writings (can't remember where), where he emphasizes that "good tyography" isn't always the best choice because what people are used to plays a really big role. So a poor type can in some circumstances be better than a well designed type, simply because people are more familiar with it, so they'll have less trouble reading text typeset in the bad, but familiar, type)
I use a relatively dark blue/green background in VS Code, with light, low saturation yellowish base color for the code. Before VS Code I used the same dark color scheme for 25+ years in Emacs. But this is for editing code where I have a bunch of colors that have a semantic job to do. The colors are a bit easier to identify precisely against a darker background. And I don't actually read code per se - I scan and orient by shape (formatting) most of the time. So editing code is very distinct from reading.
For prose/text I find it tiring to have a dark background. Not least because people get the contrast wrong because they don't know that it is different for dark backgrounds. And from an aesthetic point of view it strikes me as a bit ... well, demonstrative and perhaps childish. I'm sure this impression isn't shared by everyone, but that's the feeling i get.
And then there's what you can make work on the web.
(Interesting observation: I'm a big fan of what Erik Spiekermann says about typography - yet both the book he wrote for Adobe ("Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works") and a book about him ("Hello, I am Erik") have horribly annoying typesetting. One has horribly ugly guillemets that look like someone has taken a metal file to the type, the other has type in white-on-pink, which ought to qualify for a severe paddlin'. Is there a rule that whenever someone tries to write something about typography, things go wrong? :-).
One possible explanation might be in one of Spiekermann's writings (can't remember where), where he emphasizes that "good tyography" isn't always the best choice because what people are used to plays a really big role. So a poor type can in some circumstances be better than a well designed type, simply because people are more familiar with it, so they'll have less trouble reading text typeset in the bad, but familiar, type)