Dark Mode Appearance

In this video, we’re going to look at the new dark mode or the darker appearance we have with macOS Mojave. Let’s go to my Mac. In past macOS versions, the only thing that we could do to change the appearance was to change the appearance of what is highlighted, the color of what is highlighted. When I click on the menu here, Edit, you’re going to see that it is blue.

We’re able to do in past versions of macOS change what that color was, but we couldn’t change the overall appearance of the Mac. It always had this lighter look to it. Well, now with macOS Mojave, what we can do is we can change the appearance. We can change it to a darker appearance. To do that, what we need to do is we need to go to our system preferences. I’m going to go down to my doc here. I have my system preferences.

Now, what we need to do is we need to go to General. When we select General, you’re going to see our first option here is appearance. What we have here is we have Light and Dark. As I said before, the only thing that we could change before was the highlight color. You’re going to see by default; it is set to blue. Well, now, what we can do is we can go and change the overall appearance. Let’s go and change the appearance.

You’re going to see everything change into a darker appearance. I click on it. Now, we’re looking at a darker appearance. The menu bar has changed. Our windows have changed. The doc has changed. Even the background or the desktop picture has changed. Let’s go back over to Light. Now, everything changes back to how it was, a lighter appearance. Now, let’s go back over into Dark.

When we’re in Dark, I’m going to close this window and we go open up another app. Let’s go and open up Safari. If it’s an Apple app, it has changed into that darker appearance. You’re going to see, I’m in Safari here and it has the darker toolbar, the darker sidebar. When I go to a website, let’s go over to Apple here, it does not actually change the web page. It only changes the toolbar or the sidebar.

Let’s open up another app. We’re going to go into Mail here. I click on it, and we have a darker appearance. Now, with Mail, we do have a new setting when we’re in our darker appearance. I’m going to go and compose a new message. I click on the icon to compose a new message. My new message here is still in dark mode. When I start typing here, the text is going to be white.

Well, what we can do is we can have it appear in a lighter mode. We can have our background when creating a new email or when we’re reading an email to appear in the lighter background. To do that, we need to go to our mail preferences. I’m going to go up to Mail here, and then I’m going to go over to Preferences. We have a new window that opens up and what we need to do is we need to go to Viewing.

From here, you’re going to see we have an option here, “Use dark backgrounds for messages.” This will only show when we are using the darker appearance. If we’re in the lighter appearance that comes with Mac by default, we will not see this option. As soon as we change into our darker appearance for our dark mode, we see this option. When I de-select this, watch what happens to my draft, my email draft. When I de-select it, it is now lighter.

If you compose a lot of messages, and you like that lighter background while you’re composing messages, go into mail preferences, then go under Viewing and de-select “Use dark backgrounds for messages.” When you compose a new draft, it would still use that lighter background. I’m going to go and turn it back on. Now, we can see we have a darker background again, even for new messages. Now, we’ve seen that the dark mode works with Apple apps such as Mail and Safari.

It also works with third-party apps, but the developer of that third-party app does have to implement it. When macOS Mojave first came out, there weren’t many third-party apps that supported dark mode. Now that macOS Mojave has been out for a few months, you will see a lot more third-party apps include dark mode. The dark mode works across both Apple apps and third-party apps. It’s just that the third-party app developer does have to implement it.

That’s the new dark mode we have with macOS Mojave.