Mac Dark Mode from Command Line

By  on  

One of the best professional decisions I ever made was switching to a dark text editor theme. I suffered from horrible headaches for years, partially caused by late night coding sessions with blindingly bright computer screens. Recently Apple implemented a dark OS theme which helps my eyes, and thinking in a command line state of mind, I was wondering if there was a way to change dark or light mode via command line...and I found out how!

Switching between light and dark mode via command line is done via a boolean flag:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist _HIEnableThemeSwitchHotKey -bool true

The good news is that switching between color preferences can be done with one command; the bad news is that you need to restart your machine for the new theme to take effect.

For years I switched to dark themes on iPhone apps and text editors; I'm so thankful that Apple has afforded us this feature on laptops and desktops. Your eyes are important -- protect them!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Tables Plugin

    Tabular data can oftentimes be boring, but it doesn't need to look that way! With a small MooTools class, I can make tabular data extremely easy to read by implementing "zebra" tables -- tables with alternating row background colors. The CSS The above CSS is extremely basic.

  • By
    Image Manipulation with PHP and the GD Library

    Yeah, I'm a Photoshop wizard. I rock the selection tool. I crop like a farmer. I dominate the bucket tool. Hell, I even went as far as wielding the wizard wand selection tool once. ...OK I'm rubbish when it comes to Photoshop.

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!