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
    Get Slick with MooTools Kwicks

    When I first saw MooTools graphical navigation, I was impressed. I thought it was a very simple yet creative way of using Flash. When I right-clicked and saw that it was JavaScript, I was floored. How could they achieve such...

  • By
    Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2

    One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...

Discussion

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