Building a little utility: Swwwitch

I saw something making the rounds in the dev community recently, so I built a small tool — a quick way to consolidate a few Cocoa-app features I’d been meaning to try. Practice project, basically. Right now it includes two switches: toggle the system theme, and hide the desktop icons.

Features

1. Toggle the system theme
2. Show or hide desktop icons
3. Pure menu-bar-only app (no Dock icon)
4. Launch on login

I covered the implementation of point 3 in another post, and point 4 in this one.

Toggling the system theme

The system-theme toggle is built on top of AppleScript:

tell application "System Events"
    tell appearance preferences
        set dark mode to not dark mode
    end tell
end tell

You can run this AppleScript yourself to toggle the theme — try the link below.

Click here to run

Showing/hiding desktop icons

Hiding the desktop icons is really just running a system shell command. A Cocoa app can launch a process via Process (the new name for NSTask), and that’s exactly what we do here — kick off a short command line via NSTask:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false
killall Finder

Try it:

Click here to hide Desktop Icons

Click here to show Desktop Icons

If you’re curious, take a look at the code — the gist is straightforward. Releases

TODO

1. Add more switches
2. Add user-customised switch settings

Links

All command lines macOS supports