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

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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