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How to Enable Dark Mode on Mac

Wednesday August 12, 2020 4:19 AM PDT by Juli Clover

MacOS includes a Dark Mode option that works across the entire system, from the dock and menu bar to all of your apps.

Here's how to turn on ‌Dark Mode‌:

Choose System Preferences on the menu bar.
Select General.
In the "Appearance" section at the top of the window, click the "Dark" option.

Those are the only steps required to enable ‌Dark Mode‌. If you want to turn it off again, follow the same steps but this time choose the "Light" option.

While in Dark mode, the dock, menu bar, and all of your Apple apps, including Safari, Mail, Calendar, Notes, the Mac App Store, Messages, and more will feature darker colors and themes. ‌Dark Mode‌ will need to be built into third-party Mac apps that don't already offer a dark option when macOS Mojave is released.

Related Forum: macOS Mojave

Top Rated Comments

Internet Enzyme

83 months ago

What I don’t understand is why there isnt a keyboard shortcut or a menu bar toggle or an automatic night-shift esque switching into dark mode. I feel like those are all very obvious features that shouldn’t require a year for macOS 10.15 to be in the OS

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Ragefury

83 months ago

I don‘t understand why everyone seems to like dark mode. It does look cool, but my eyes are irritated after less than a minute when reading white text on dark background.

Dark mode is not meant for casual users, it meant to be use by individuals that spend a lot of time in front of an screen, developers, frontend dudes, designers, etc...adobe For example has a dark mode, most code IDE’s have a dark mode and it’s welcomed by everyone that uses them.

Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)

TantalizedMind

83 months ago

WHY IS THERE NO DARK MODE FOR iOS?!!!!!!

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

m0sher

83 months ago

I’d rather have Dark mode option for iOS please.

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MacHiavelli

83 months ago

Lots of dark applications on top of each other are very difficult to distinguish between: there is no sense of depth or layering (as yet).

And in light mode, it would be nice to still have an option for a dark menu bar and dock.

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

kriebe

83 months ago

I'm really excited about this for many reasons, but the first thing that popped in my head was that I finally get back the black background for all of my photos that was lost from the switch from iPhoto to Photos. It's so much easier to look at a ton of photos on a black background compared to a white one. There's a reason why almost all TVs and Monitors have a dark bezel.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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