Is this legit? A friend was telling me you can now enable “dark menus” on Mac OS X and that it makes the entire interface look more cool. What is it, and how do I become dark menu enabled?
Though it sounds like something related to the Avengers or perhaps Batman, turns out that there is a new feature in Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” that’s called “dark menus” and it has nothing to do with evil powers from another planet, Darth Vader or even Loki doing something mischievous.
Unfortunately! 🙂
Instead, it’s a way to flip the color scheme of the top menu bar and the bottom Dock on your Mac system. And it does look pretty cool. I have it enabled on my Mac and I like how it lets me focus just a bit more on the window I’m working in by blending the menu in with the actual edge of my MacBook Pro.
To start, here’s the standard top menu color scheme:
Pretty standard stuff we’ve seen for years. Note that it’s slightly translucent too.
On the bottom of the screen, the Dock:
To enable dark menus go to “System Preferences…” > General and look at the very top of the window. I’ve chopped it up a bit to make the screen shot smaller, but the top looks like this:
See that option near the top? “Use dark menu bar and Dock”. Check it and things change instantly!
Now the top menu bar looks like this:
A huge change. The Dock change is a lot more subtle, however:
As I said, I really like it, especially since most of my desktop images tend to be dark and have a lot of black in them. And who knows, perhaps this is a small step towards Apple letting us change some of the basic color scheme of Mac OS X. Or… nahhhh, probably not.
Anyway, now you know how to enable it. Easy enough!