Change Appearance settings on Mac
On your Mac, use Appearance settings to change the overall look of macOS, and choose how you use scroll bars. Learn how to use a light or dark appearance.
To change these settings, choose Apple menu 
in the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down.)
Open Appearance settings for me
Option | Description |
|---|---|
Appearance | Choose the appearance for buttons, menus and windows on your Mac. Light provides a light appearance that doesn’t change. Dark provides a darkened appearance so the content you’re working on stands out while windows and controls seem to recede into the background. It’s effective for viewing documents, presentations, photos, movies, web pages and more. Auto switches the appearance from light to dark based on the Night Shift schedule you set. See Change Night Shift settings. Auto won’t switch the appearance until your Mac has been idle for at least a minute, or if an app is preventing the display from sleeping, such as during media playback. |
Accent colour | Choose the colour to use for buttons, pop-up menus, and other UI controls. |
Highlight colour | Choose the colour to use for highlighting selected text. |
Sidebar icon size | Choose small, medium or large icons for the Finder sidebar and for the sidebar in apps such as Mail, News and Photos. The size of text in the sidebar also changes. |
Allow wallpaper tinting in windows | Allow colours from the desktop picture to subtly tint certain window areas, such as toolbars or status bars. |
Show scroll bars | Scroll bars appear in a window when there’s content that doesn’t fit into the window’s current size. Choose an option to control when scroll bars are shown:
|
Click in the scroll bar to |
To momentarily switch between scrolling methods while working, press and hold the Option key while clicking the scroll bar. |
To increase the size of text and icons, see Make text and other items on the screen bigger.