Docs
Dark mode
A recolour of the platform's own design tokens, not a filter over the page.
Turning it on
Alt+Shift+D, or tt in the palette, or the toggle in the popup. It is off by default.
Flipping it retints every open tab immediately. There is no reload, and no flash of the light theme on the next page you open.
Why it is not an inversion
ServiceNow ships around 5,700 design tokens, and they are flattened RGB triples rather than a chain of references:
--now-card--background-color: 255,255,255;
Nothing cascades from anything, so a single override at the root changes nothing. Every token has to be recoloured on its own.
What makes that tractable is the naming convention. The token's name says what it is for, and the treatment follows from that:
| The name says | Treatment |
|---|---|
--background-color, _surface, _brand | white and near-white collapse onto a dark ramp; chrome that was already dark is left alone |
--border-color, _divider | lands between the surface and the text |
--color used as ink | dark text lightens; white text on a brand button stays white |
neutral-0..21, primary-0..3 | the ramp is read backwards, so every step keeps a colour the platform designed |
The result is a theme the platform's own designers could have shipped, rather than a hue rotation that turns every logo green.
The places it has to work
Three separate rendering worlds, each needing its own pass:
- the Next Experience shell, including components that live inside shadow roots
- classic lists and forms, including pages served with
sysparm_use_polaris=false, where the CSS has no tokens at all and the colours are literals - Service Portal, where widget CSS is stored on the instance and beats a stylesheet on specificity, so it needs a JavaScript pass rather than a rule
Themes
Beyond dark and light there are full custom themes, built in the Themes panel of the manage page. A theme starts from a single colour: a generator derives eight anchors from it while respecting WCAG contrast targets, and all 5,731 tokens follow from there. You then override whatever you like across ten sections, each with up to four slots.
A slot you did not touch stays derived and is never saved, which is what lets Generate move everything you left alone and nothing you chose. A theme belongs to your account rather than to a profile, and while it is active it takes precedence over both dark and light mode.