There are two main things you can do in your Win32 app to support both Light and Dark themes.

To fully support Dark mode, the entirety of an app's surface must follow the dark theme. Some Windows UI frameworks, such as WinUI 3, automatically detect a system's theme and adjust the UI to follow the system theme. Some apps contain two sets of UIs (one with a light color and one with a dark color). There are many approaches to implementing Dark mode support in an application. If you find it confusing that the foreground color is light in Dark mode and dark in Light mode, it may help to think of the foreground color as 'the default text color'. The concept of a foreground in Windows is the text color. The concept of a background in Windows is the large area of colors in an app, or the page color. In practice, this means that in Dark mode, most of the UI will be dark, and in Light mode most of the UI will be light. Large, solid background areas and text backgrounds should generally be closer to the background color than the foreground color.Foreground elements, highlights, and text should be closer to the foreground color than the background color.So you might in fact see light blue text on a dark blue background in some parts of the UI, and that would still be considered acceptable Dark mode UI.ĭue to the wide diversity of UI in different apps, the color mode, and foreground and background colors are meant as more of a directional guideline than a hard rule:

The reason we use ' black or dark' and ' white or light' is because there are additional colors such as the Accent color that can tint various foreground and background colors. In Dark mode, you will generally see white or light text on black or dark backgrounds. In Light Mode, you will generally see black or dark text on white or light backgrounds.Ī dark background with a contrasting light foreground. ModeĪ light background with a contrasting dark foreground. The Color Mode in settings (which includes Light and Dark modes) is a setting that defines the overall foreground and background colors for the operating system and apps. We are working hard to broaden support for Dark mode without breaking existing applications, and to that end we're providing technical guidance for updating a Win32 desktop Windows app to support both Light and Dark modes. Also, darker UI colors can reduce the battery usage on some types of computer displays, such as OLED screens. Users might prefer this setting because it's easier on the eyes in lower-light environments, or they might simply prefer a darker interface in general. Windows uses Light mode by default, but users can choose Dark mode, which changes much of the UI to a dark color. Windows supports Light and Dark themes as a personalization option in Windows settings.

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