How to Use Dark Mode for Your Files Without Changing the Whole Mac
You like your Mac light during the day, but hours spent sorting photos or project folders are easier on the eyes in dark mode. Or it's the other way round: the whole Mac is dark, and you'd rather read file names in black on white. Either way, you look for a dark mode for the Finder alone, and there isn't one.
The short answer: macOS has a single appearance for the whole Mac, set in System Settings › Appearance, and the Finder follows it. There is no setting for the Finder alone, nor for any other single app: an app can only look different from the rest of the Mac if it has its own appearance setting. Folia Files has one. In its Settings › Themes, set Appearance to Dark (or Light): every Folia Files window switches, and the rest of your Mac stays as it is.
What macOS lets you choose
One appearance for the whole Mac
Open System Settings › Appearance and choose Light, Dark or Auto. Auto switches between the two over the course of the day. The choice applies to everything that follows the system: the Finder, the menus, Apple's own apps and most others.
Nothing for one app, and nothing in the Finder
System Settings has no list of apps with an appearance each, and the Finder's own settings have no appearance option. Whether an app can look different from the rest of the Mac is up to that app: a few offer their own light and dark setting, most simply follow the Mac. The Finder is one of those.
What about the Terminal commands found online?
Search for “dark mode only for Finder” and you'll come across Terminal commands that are supposed to keep one app light while the Mac is dark, or the reverse. They are not a solution. They change a hidden preference that was never meant for this, they don't change the Finder on current versions of macOS, and a hidden setting changed by hand is easy to forget the day an app looks wrong. We won't repeat them here.
A dark file manager on a light Mac, in Folia Files
Folia Files keeps its own appearance, apart from the Mac's. It changes the app's windows and nothing else. More about it on the themes and customization page.
- Choose Folia Files › Settings… (⌘,), then Themes in the list on the left.
- In the Colors section, set Appearance to Dark. Or to Light, to keep your files light on a dark Mac.
- That's all. Every Folia Files window switches at once, while the menu bar, the Dock and your other apps stay as they were.
The third choice, System, is the default: Folia Files then follows the Mac, Auto included, and turns dark or light when the Mac does.
The same choice comes up the first time you open Folia Files, on the Your Look page of the welcome, under Window and text. You can change it in Settings at any time.
What follows Folia Files' appearance
- All its windows: the main windows with their panes and sidebars, Settings, the drawer that slides out of the screen's edge, and the clipboard history palette.
- File icons in the VS Code style, which have light and dark variants.
- The previews Folia Files draws itself, for code, JSON and Markdown: their colors are made for a light or a dark window.
- The built-in terminal (website edition): with its colors set to Match Theme, the default, it uses the panes' background, light or dark like the window.
What stays with the Mac
- The menu bar, and Folia Files' icon in it: it belongs to macOS.
- Files you open in other apps: a PDF opens in its own app, which follows the Mac, or its own setting.
- The Finder and the desktop.
Themes: light or dark, in any color
Light and dark is only the first choice. Folia Files comes with 8 themes (Folia, Ocean, Dusk, Forest, Lavender, Midnight, Graphite and Classic), and the Gallery section of the same page adds 20 more. Every one of them works in light and in dark, because choosing a theme never changes your appearance. Hover over the Appearance control and Folia Files says so: “Kept when you switch themes.” Pick Midnight while Folia Files is light and you get Midnight's colors in light. The theme previews on the page are drawn in the appearance you use, so each one shows what you'll get.
A few more things work the same way:
- A gallery theme joins yours. One click adds it to your themes and shows it. The theme you were using stays in the list, and a banner says Theme “Coral” applied, with a Back to button naming your previous theme in case you change your mind. The twenty themes are also on our theme gallery page, each shown in light and in dark; Use this theme opens Folia Files and adds it.
- The translucent window stays yours too. View › Translucent Window (also in the Window section of the Themes page) lets the desktop and the windows behind show through Folia Files, in light as in dark, and it stays when you switch themes. With Reduce transparency turned on in macOS's Accessibility settings, the window stays opaque.
- Make a theme your own. Change the accent color (or tick Use the macOS accent color), the Surface tint or the Background: the changes show at once, in the appearance you chose. Save as New Theme keeps them, Export… writes a .json file you can share, and Import… reads one.
Open your folders there, not in the Finder
A dark file manager only helps if your folders open in it. When Safari or Mail shows a download in the Finder, the Finder comes up, light or dark like the Mac. In the website edition of Folia Files, you can send those requests to Folia Files instead: see how to make another file manager open instead of the Finder.
Your look also travels with you: the appearance and the themes are part of Settings Backup, to iCloud or to a folder, and come back on another Mac.
