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
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools, Part II:  Controls and Events

    Last week we created a very simple MooTools slideshow script. The script was very primitive: no events and no next/previous controls -- just cross-fading between images. This tutorial will take the previous slideshow script a step further by: Adding "Next" and "Previous" controls. Adding...

  • By
    Scroll IFRAMEs on iOS

    For the longest time, developers were frustrated by elements with overflow not being scrollable within the page of iOS Safari.  For my blog it was particularly frustrating because I display my demos in sandboxed IFRAMEs on top of the article itself, so as to not affect my site's...

Discussion

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