Ternary button for theme/color mode is an anti-pattern

[gabalafou]

There was a discussion about the light/dark/auto button, and there was general support to make it more like the one in the MDN docs.

[smeragoel]

I feel that there are two slightly separate discussions here, this is how I interpreted it:

• The original issue was that the Auto option in the theme switcher is not necessary because of a bug that set auto==light theme for the user all the time, so they wanted to remove the auto option.
• Your suggestion to switch from a ternary button to a dropdown - it'll still have the auto option, but just might make it easier for folks to customise what themes they want.

I think switching to a dropdown is an excellent idea. I don't pay much attention to the icons, and just click the button rapidly until I get the desired theme, often cycling multiple times so I'd personally also prefer the dropdown.

From a UX perspective, a dropdown will:

• Give better control over switching the themes
• Allow us to explicitly write the theme names so that we don't have to rely on icons (which are not universal)
• Allowing people to add more themes!

I did a quick mockup of this on Figma, however, this is not a new design and is reusing the dropdown component we already use in the theme, along with options that have icons next to them.