Quickly Switching Between Light and Dark Mode With NightOwl

Dark Mode in macOS Mojave is a great new feature, but Apple didn't give us a way to quickly switch between light and dark modes. The little donation-ware app NightOwl gives you that control in your menu bar. You can also set a keyboard shortcut, select apps to stay in light mode, and set specific times to switch between modes.


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One of the big new features of Mac OS Mojave is the ability to switch into Dark Mode. Dark mode is pretty cool and a lot of people prefer working in it. Some people prefer switching between light and dark modes depending upon the time of day or the app they're using. Or maybe just as a way to kind of, you know, change things up a bit and get some more work done. But in order to do that now you have to go to System Preferences and then you have to go to General and then there you can switch to Dark Mode and you can switch back to light mode. It's a few too many steps to actually to do it as a quick change.

But there is a third party app, and I don't usually talk about third party apps that often, but there's this little free third party app by just a single developer who has created something called NightOwl. If you install it, it appears here as this little owl up in your Tool Bar. So you can get it by going to nightowl.kramser.xyz and I'll include that link in the MacMost post. You install it and once you do it's just this little guy up here. Click on it and you get this control here to switch between light and dark. So I can switch there and I can switch back to light. It's a lot easier than going to System Preferences.

You can even do it a little quicker with some keyboard shortcuts. There's a Settings button here. I'll click on the Settings button and you can set a Hotkey. So you've got a choice between three hotkeys. I wish it provided the option to set your own especially using a letter key or an F key or something. But you do have that. You also can quickly go and switch by using whatever the control click is on your trackpad or mouse. It doesn't work for me with the control on the keyboard but if I use two fingers on my trackpad I can quickly switch between them.

There's also some other options as well. You have the option to set for Sunrise/Sunset or Scheduled which is nice. Also you have the option to turn off Dark Mode for specific apps. This is really cool and something you don't get at all in the standard functionality with just the system.

So you need to be running the app so the app won't appear here unless it's running. Once it's running you can turn it off and you have to restart the app. So now, for instance Pages, is going to be in light mode all the time. So here's Pages in light mode. Now if I switch to dark mode I haven't enabled this yet. So Pages is going to go to dark mode and maybe you don't like that right. It doesn't really bring anything to it. I mean mostly you're focusing on the page itself which is not going to be dark, of course, because you want to see accurate colors and everything. So if you want to turn Pages off you go into here. You can see I've already checked it but I need to restart Pages. So I'm going to Quit Pages and I'm going to restart it here. Now notice that Pages is going to be in light mode. So whenever I'm in dark mode now Pages will be in light mode which is really nice.

If there's another app, Maps for instance, maybe I don't like the dark mode for Maps and I don't mind that it's in light mode even if I want to be in dark mode. So I will go and Quit Maps and launch Maps again and now Maps is going to be in light mode even though everything else, like say this Numbers spreadsheet here, and the main interface, that's all in dark mode.

So it's a really handy little extension here. It's donationware so it's definitely something until Apple actually gives us an easier way to maybe access and switch between light and dark mode. It's a good work around now and I see a lot of people using it. It's getting pretty popular.

Related Posts:
How Do I Change My Microsoft Office Documents From Using Dark Background?, How Do I Achieve a Dark Mode Menu Bar, With Light Mode for Everything Else?, Using Dark Mode With macOS Mojave, How To Simulate Dark Mode In Pages

Link: https://nightowl.kramser.xyz