Guides

Dark mode

Using appearance to manage and integrate dark mode.

Overview

Light and dark modes are supported out of the box, allowing you to easily switch appearance without additional design or styling.

King Krule – The OOZ

A dark and introspective album that showcases a distinctive blend of genres.

King Krule – The OOZ

A dark and introspective album that showcases a distinctive blend of genres.

Basic usage

By default, the root Theme appearance is light. To set a different appearance pass it via the appearance prop. This will force the theme to use the specified setting.

<Theme appearance="dark">
<MyApp />
</Theme>

Inheriting system appearance

A common requirement is to inherit the appearance setting from a user’s system preferences.

This is a deceptively complex problem to solve given SSR, SSG and client side hydration considerations. To make implementation easier, we recommend integrating with a theme switching library.

With next-themes

Integration with next-themes is simple and straightforward because Radix Themes implements matching class names.

To enable dark mode, use <ThemeProvider> from next-themes with attribute="class".

import { Theme } from "@radix-ui/themes";
import { ThemeProvider } from "next-themes";
export default function () {
return (
<ThemeProvider attribute="class">
<Theme>
<MyApp />
</Theme>
</ThemeProvider>
);
}

Do not try to set <Theme appearance={resolvedTheme}>. Instead, rely just on class switching that next-themes provides. This way next-themes can prevent the appearance flash during initial render.

With other libraries

Any library that supports class switching is compatible. You’ll just need to ensure that the appended class names match those supported by Radix Themes:

  • className="light"
  • className="light-theme"
  • className="dark"
  • className="dark-theme"
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