Dark Mode in GitHub

David Gilbertson
11 min readApr 12, 2020

There’s no official dark mode for GitHub (December 2020 update: yes there is!) but this doesn’t mean you must suffer the retina-burning white of the default design.

In this post I take a look at 8 options for going dark. The winner, in my opinion, is Dark Reader. So if you’re in a hurry, you may be excused.

First I’ll mention a few things about each of the contenders, then I’ll show them side-by-side in action across various GitHub pages. Beware, there are a lot of screenshots on this page; if bandwidth use is a concern for you, leave now while you still can.

The contenders

Dark Reader

An extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

This darkens any site, which is great — there’s no need for your GitHub dark mode to look different to your npm dark mode. You can either have it turned on by default for all sites, then selectively turn it off, or vice versa.

It’s a very impressive thing.

Extension settings

The brightness/contrast is configurable, which is neat.

(I think the ‘Dark’ icon is what you’d get if Darth Vader and Beelzebot had a baby, and the ‘Light’ icon is the result of a steamy rendezvous between Luke Skywalker and Elton John.)

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