MacOS – Enable macOS “Dark menu bar and Dock” without password or restarting

macosterminal

Is there a way to programmatically enable the macOS "Dark menu bar and Dock" option (found in System Preferences > General) via a Terminal command, without having to restart the Mac?

There is a way to change this option in the Terminal, but it requires the use of sudo and seems to require a restart, neither of which I want to use.

I could do this via the Terminal using AppleScript, but as far as I can tell it would require GUI scripting and my having to allow Terminal to control the Mac in the Accessibility settings.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, changing system preference files will always require administrative permissions, which is something the user has to explicitly give your script.

Fortunately, there is a way to accomplish this without changing system preference files! Using AppleScript, one can ask the system event daemon to change the system appearance.

I'm testing this on my work laptop, which doesn't allow me to change Accessibility preferences, so I don't even know if Terminal is enabled there (I suspect it's not). Additionally, this does not do any GUI scripting! (I recorded the below gif with System Preferences not running) Instead, it performs the same action that checking the box in System Preferences performs, but without needing access to that checkbox.

Hope this works for you!

AppleScript

-- Toggle dark mode
tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode

-- Enable dark mode, even it it's already enabled
tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to true

-- Disable dark mode, even it it's already disabled
tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to false

Bash

Don't wanna have something kick off an AppleScript? I'm with you. You can execute any AppleScript from bash (and thus the terminal) passing it as a string to the osascript -e command:

# Toggle dark mode
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode'

# Enable dark mode, even it it's already enabled
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to true'

# Disable dark mode, even it it's already disabled
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to false'

I have made a proof-of-concept app that shows off this technique, plus a couple others:

macOS Dark Mode Switcher

Example of the above app at work

Related Solutions

MacOS – way to turn on and off the Mouse Keys feature using AppleScript or a terminal command

Here's the GUI scripting solution:

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "Mouse" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "System Preferences"
            tell first window
                tell first tab group
                    tell radio group 1
                        if value of radio button 1 is 1 then
                            # enabled, so disable
                            click radio button 2
                        else
                            # disabled, so enable
                            click radio button 1
                        end if
                    end tell
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
    quit
end tell

It will launch System Preferences if required, but doesn't show the window and quits it afterwards, so from a UI POV, it at least doesn't show the window.

You can change the persistent setting on which the System Preferences configuration is based using the following commands:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriver -bool YES
defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriver -bool NO

Unfortunately, this only changes the configuration file and does not apply the changes to the running system.

While you can programmatically press Option keys using AppleScript, like the following:

tell application "System Events"
    key down option
    key up option
end tell

The press Option five times to toggle setting is at a higher level and doesn't get triggered by this. While all regular Option key presses are ignored after you only run key down option, you can still toggle Mouse Keys.

Debugging System Preferences while changing the setting shows calls to LaunchUAServerIfNeeded and UAMouseKeysSetEnabled in the private UniversalAccessCore framework. Unless we reverse engineer that framework and write our own binaries, I don't think we'll get a proper programmatic way to do this.

MacOS – iTunes track notifications for Mountain Lion

As best as I've been able to tell, this feature has been removed.

There are two alternatives to the Lion-provided notification mechanism that provide a few more features and customizability.

If you have Growl installed, you can use GrowlTunes to provide Growl notifications on track and playback changes.

The official Last.fm Scrobbler app provides notifications via Growl as well, the bonus being that it's worth using if you also scrobble your playback history to Last.fm. If you don't you probably want to stick with GrowlTunes.

Growl is a generic notification system with a large amount of customizability, like the ability to customize the alert style. Growl has existed for OS X for as long as I can remember, years and years pre-dating even Tiger, iOS, and the Notification Center as well.