1. System-Wide Dark Mode
macOS Mojave’s system-wide dark mode is a revelation for late-night workers. It’s beautiful and well integrated, requiring only a switch to enable. Visit “System Preferences -> General” and select the Dark Mode option. If your Mac doesn’t run Mojave, you can still get access to dark mode’s power. Dark mode can also be dimmed further. By selecting dark grey as your accent color in “System Preferences -> General,” the background tint color will change, allowing dark mode to get darker.
2. Automatically Shift to Dark Mode
If you don’t like using dark mode during the day, you might just switch it off. But why are we doing repetitive tasks manually? That’s what computers are for! Shifty, which typically controls Night Shift, has a built-in feature allowing it to toggle dark mode when Night Shift kicks in. After the sun sets, your Mac will automatically shift the screen to orange and enable Dark Mode. It’s one of the apps we recommend for managing dark mode settings, so it’s worth downloading. You can also use NightOwl, which provides the automatic dark mode functionality only. It is in early versions, so it might not be as reliable as you’d like yet.
3. Enable Time-Based Screen Dimming
Similarly, we can make the screen dim at specific times. While you might think macOS’ screen dimming functionality would take care of this, it doesn’t always work great. Further, it can often be fooled by lamps shining directly on your computer, as with a desk lamp you might use when burning the midnight oil. NightTone will automatically dim your screen’s brightness based on a schedule. You can also use it to tint your screen in a far wider range of colors than simply orange.
4. Mastering Night Shift’s Settings
For years Flux was a must-have app for any night owls. Today, Flux on macOS has largely been supplanted by Night Shift. A built-in Mac utility, Night Shift automatically changes the color of your screen after sunset, tinting it more orange. This is supposed to help with sleep by improving light-based melatonin generation, and it’s definitely easier on the eyes. Unlike Flux, Night Shift lacks significant settings. Shifty fixes that for us. This menu bar app provides almost exactly the same controls found in Flux. You can disable for specific apps, disable for a custom time period, change the degree of tinting, and disable for an hour. It’s a must-have utility for anyone who does color-sensitive work at night. You could also stick with Flux, the progenitor of screen-warming applications for desktop computers. It works excellently and reliably and provides precise color options and scheduling tools well beyond what Shifty reveals.
5. Eliminating White Backgrounds on Websites
As much as possible, we should eliminate white background. With the entire system in dark mode, the most frequent culprit will be web pages. Some sites, like YouTube and DuckDuckGo, offer built-in dark modes, while other sites require extensions or, more commonly, userscripts. Using a userscript browser extension like Stylus for Firefox or Tampermonkey for Chrome, we can implement custom CSS rules that change white backgrounds to black. Once you’ve installed an appropriate extension, visit userstyles.org and check out what’s available. You can check out our favorite dark mode styles for Google, Wikipedia, and Stack Overflow, as well as a reasonably functional universal dark mode.
Conclusion
Night-friendly macOS goes way beyond Mojave’s built-in dark mode. If you’re staying up late, make the shift: your eyes will thank you.
