How to customise your Mac desktop

Finally, heres a few quick hacks for Yosemites Dark mode. The first is from former Macworld contributor Rob Griffiths. Yosemite overhauled the Dock with a new flatter translucent design, removing the ages-old ability to switch the Dock to black 2D look. If you want something similar to that in Yosemite, open a Terminal window (youll find it in the Utilities folder of the Applications list) and paste in the following as a single line, then hit enter:

defaults write -g AppleInterfaceStyle Dark;killall Dock;sleep 3;defaults remove -g AppleInterfaceStyle

Sadly, this only lasts until you next reboot, when youll have to repeat the procedure! To restore the dock to normal at any time, just type killall Dock into a Terminal window.

To be able to activate Dark mode instantly, try this hack. Again open a Terminal window and paste in the following, which should be entered as a single line:

defaults write -g _HIEnableThemeSwitchHotKey 1

Then log out via the Apple menu, and log back in again. Once you do so youll be able to switch instantly to/from Dark mode by tapping Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+T (Ctrl+Option+Cmd+T on some keyboards).

To deactivate the keyboard shortcut, again open a Terminal window and paste-in the following before logging out and back in again:

defaults delete -g _HIEnableThemeSwitchHotKey

Read: How to turn on Dark Mode in Yosemite

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How to customise your Mac desktop