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One cannot help but marvel at Microsoft: a feature this simple, deferred for years on end, is at last poised for development. The Windows 11 preview build has lately revealed a wealth of strings pertaining to automatic theme switching. Among these, there is a scheduled automatic mode. As the discovered strings indicate, Windows 11 will be able to alternate between light and dark modes. It will do so according to the sunrise and sunset times of the user’s locale.
Microsoft’s Procrastination Runs Deep
Today’s mainstream operating systems already furnish both dark and light modes. Dark mode is chiefly employed in the evening, when it spares the eyes a screen too harsh to behold. Automatic light-dark switching, meanwhile, denotes the system’s capacity to shift to dark mode after sunset. This can occur in accordance with a user-set time or the local sunrise and sunset. The system can then revert to light mode the following day.
Windows 10 already supported dark mode, yet to this day Microsoft has offered no automatic light-dark switching. Users have therefore had to toggle it manually or rely on third-party software to achieve automatic switching. This ought properly to have been a basic feature provided by the system itself.
Microsoft Is Finally Preparing the Automatic Switch
In the Windows 11 test builds, Microsoft is indeed developing an automatic light-dark switching feature. Moreover, a great many strings now allude to automatic theme switching. The scheduled automatic mode denotes a user’s ability to arrange the switching times themselves. Meanwhile, sunrise-sunset switching may be enabled by default.
There is also an option to forgo automatic switching while the user is actively using the computer. That is, the system will switch according to the arranged mode only once it detects the machine is idle. This averts the disruption of a sudden automatic mode change in the midst of a user’s work or meeting.
At present, in macOS, Apple switches automatically by the arranged time, doing so even while the user is actively using the Mac. A sudden change of mode on screen can therefore be momentarily disorienting. Nevertheless, after prolonged use one seems to grow accustomed to it without much trouble.
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