I’ll cut right to the chase: Coda’s version of dark mode has arrived! We’ve been working through how to build the often-requested feature natively to Coda for a while now, and I’m excited to share that we’re ready for you to try it out.
Simply click your avatar in the upper right hand corner of Coda, and toggle the “Appearance (Beta)” setting to “Dark”. Or keep it on “Light” if you prefer the classic look. We recommend choosing the “Use system setting” option, which will match any schedules you have set up your browser or computer. You can also type “/Dark Mode” in your doc to toggle it anytime.
This is a user-level setting - it will apply for all your docs when you turn dark mode on, but your colleagues may have different settings.
The Coda color palette will adjust when you switch to dark mode so that everything is still easy to read on the dark background. If you’re viewing a document in dark mode and a colleague is viewing in light mode, they may see things in a slightly different shade.
Dark mode is available on mobile as well. If the “Use System Setting” option doesn’t work for you, please try the “Dark” setting to make it work.
Since we’re releasing this in Beta, there might still be some small visual bugs. In our internal testing, we haven’t found anything that prevents people from doing the things they love in Coda - so we wanted to open up this feature as soon as possible. But if you see anything we should address, please let us know using this form.
We hope this change makes Coda more accessible to more users, accommodates more visual requirements, and reduces potential eye strain and power usage on the machines of our mega-makers.
Jesus, every single time I leave Coda,io it’s like you guys sense it and throw me the one feature I always want. Left because the layout was awful, all of a sudden you make everything tighter, and less spacious… Boom you had me back. Left because of no file attachments, oh wait feature release, boom I’m back. Dark mode was essential for me, so I left a few weeks ago and boom, here you are again!
Let’s hope I’ll stick this time. Good job team, you do an incredible job of listening to your users.
Thanks a lot! It will be much more confortable using Coda at night. The form for feedback has a field for gifs / images, but it is a text field, so I can’t upload any image.
Thank you, @ezeugo!
The new dark mode is awesome - and a user-level ‘Dark Mode’ setting is a great 1st step!. For so long, many of us (including me) have been compensating for the lack of ‘dark mode’ by using the Chromium ‘Dark Reader’ add-on. So, this is great news that so many other users can now easily ‘switch’ dark mode on easily without the need for any browser add-ons.
What is STILL really needed at this time is the ability to define custom default Doc page BACKGROUND and TEXT colors - that will appear when the doc is publicly or privately published in the gallery and/or embedded on other web pages/sites.
Right now, if I embed a table/graph/section from a Coda Doc on web page/site with a dark theme, these elements all default to a stark/boring WHITE background. And these embeds looks really disintegrated.
Also, specialty docs, white papers, brochures, etc. are often ‘themed’ and published with rich colorful backgrounds and contrasting font colors, are not possible to produce in Coda – so this new user-level dark mode setting does little to help with this issue or enforce a consistent doc look/theme across all users.
Conclusion/Suggestion: Next, provide the ability to specify custom doc 'background’ and ‘font’ colors as part of the basic document properties. Docs that have these colors customized would retain these themed colors when viewed/published/ or embedded on other websites. Coda docs that use the default/un-customized colors would be displayed according to each individual user’s ‘light/dark’ appearance setting.
I’m thrilled to see this added! Absolutely thrilled. That being said, my apologies for saying this, but, compared to other applications’ dark themes, I find it to be kinda ugly? All of a sudden my docs have this really horrible green on brown-ish gray, and it’s a little unfortunate that, once users start turning on Dark Mode for themselves, they’re going to be experiencing what I find to be a sub-par aesthetic. At least when there was only light mode, I knew what everybody was getting.
Maybe it’ll take some getting used to, but I do hope that there will be some improvements in this area Accessbility-wise though, this is a huge win, and I’m happy to see it in action!
You can learn more about the (long!) process it took to develop, design, and build Coda’s dark mode here: Designing Coda's dark mode
As a Beta, this is definitely a first, foundational step in further customization for Coda. That said, we’re going to collect feedback and continue testing this first iteration for a while (while working on some pretty big updates in the next few months ), so I do want to set expectations that published docs are likely to look roughly the same in the near term.
Thanks for your feedback – we read every word of it!
Hi Joseph! I had the same feeling, but I discovered something. All my conditional formatting was changed to a “Custom color” after the update. If you choose one of the preset color options, it will look much better. But yes, I had to do it in all my pages to get a better design. Also, once you set it to the preset options, you will find it works nicely on light theme too.
Hi, I would love to learn more about what colors you’re referring to. The yellow for example does lean brown to provide better accessibility for everyone. In terms of the overall aesthetic are there other factors that come to mind? We are in beta and there are few design tasks in the list that we were not able to get to.
So happy you have made use of the preset options-those work really well and are easy to use. I would like to follow up on your comment on “Custom color”. Were you expecting that any color in light mode is the same in dark or did you mean something else? I’d love to understand and improve the experience.
It just “easier” to the eyes in certain situations. Its really nice option to have.
!!!
! Thank you so so very much 
Accessbility-wise though, this is a huge win, and I’m happy to see it in action!
), so I do want to set expectations that published docs are likely to look roughly the same in the near term.