Mix Dark and Light Mode on Mac with ‘Gray’

Like dark mode on your Mac, but not in every application? The free and open source application Gray lets you opt certain apps out of the setting, so you can be dark in some applications and light in others.

Dark mode is pretty polarizing: people seem to love it or hate it. There’s room for nuance, though. Maybe you love taking notes using dark mode but prefer reading long texts on bright backdrops. Of maybe you just hate the way some applications handle dark mode. The nice thing about Gray is that you can choose which applications use which theme, even if the applications in questions don’t otherwise give you that choice.

You can download Gray from Github. To get started, make sure that dark mode is turned on. To so so, open System Settings, head to Appearance, then make sure the Dark option is selected. Now open Gray. Click any application and you can set it to force light mode.

Credit: Justin Pot

Note that your application will need to be restarted in order for the setting to apply. Gray does this automatically, so make sure there’s no unsaved data in any windows before you start configuring everything. Any application you click will restart and open in light mode.

Note that you can’t do this the other way around—that is, you can’t start in light mode and choose certain applications to launch in dark mode. That has to do with the way Gray works—it adds a system configuration that forces light mode. The upside of this: you don’t need to keep Gray running, or even installed, for the setting to keep working after you configure things the way you like.