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Dark mode toggling on macOS

How to toggle dark mode with BetterTouchTool


In web development, building services to work in light and dark modes is becoming increasingly common. In macOS, you can toggle the appearance (light or dark) within the General settings in the System Preferences. However, manually toggling the mode is tedious when switching between the modes during development. Fortunately, we can use BetterTouchTool (lifetime license is $22 as of writing this), a handy software for customizing macOS, to define a shortcut for the desired behaviour.

Using Better Touch Tool macOS app to toggle dark mode
Creating a new shortcut to any action within BetterTouchTool might look confusing at first, but after a while the flow should start to make sense.

First, select Keyboard shortcuts from the top bar dropdown. From there, record a shortcut of your liking. Finally, assign an action to the shortcut. The action we're looking for is Toggle Dark Mode. Now hitting your shortcut should toggle between light and dark mode. Ah, how convenient!

Quick dark mode toggling is great for web developers who want to style for both modes.

That's it, now go and toggle to your heart's content!

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