3/22/229:00 am Understanding Accent And Highlight Colors On a Mac The Accent and Highlight colors used in almost every app on your Mac. Each app has its own default colors. But you can override them in System Preferences to force each app to use the same colors. You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads). Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about accent and highlight colors on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. So when you're in an App, like in Pages here, there's an Accent Color and a Highlight Color. Notice here when I have things selected, like Document here in the Sidebar or these Checkboxes, they've got this orange color. But also when I select text like this there's also this lighter shade of orange that is used to show the selection. The darker color here is known as the Accent Color. It's used in all sorts of different controls. You could see it here, for instance. You could also see it when you go to Preferences in all sorts of different controls here. Now in Pages these are both a shade of orange. But if I switch over to Numbers you could see instead of orange there's green. Then in Keynote I get Blue. Notice how these all match the same color used in the icon. You could see orange here in the Pages icon, green in the Numbers icon, and blue in the Keynote icon. So every app has its own default accent and highlight color. If you don't change anything in System Preferences each app will use its own set of colors. However, if you go to System Preferences and then General you have settings here for Accent Color and Highlight Color. The first one for each one of these is this multicolored wheel here. That's an indicator that each app should use its own default color for the Accent color or for the Highlight color. So when these are both set like this then every app has a different color. However, if I were to change these I could force all apps to use the same color. So, for instance, if I were to change to using purple notice the Accent color is set to purple and the Highlight color automatically changes to have the matching color there. So the purple highlight color. I could still change the Highlight color to whatever I want. So let's do that. Let's change the Highlight color to yellow. Now when I go into Pages here you'll see the Accent color is now purple and the Highlight color is now yellow. It's the same in Numbers. I get purple and yellow. In Keynote as well. Purple and yellow. So by setting these to something besides that first item I can force all apps to use the Accent Color and Highlight Color that I want. Other apps use these as well. For instance if I go into Contacts here you could see Contacts uses a blue color for the Accent and for the Highlight. Now if I go into Settings and change it to red and say green you could see now red and green are used. Now Reminders is an example of an app that uses colors a lot. Every list has its own color. So you see the name of this list in blue because if I were to Control Click on it here and show list info you could see I've selected blue as the color for this list. So that's going to override anything else. But notice here the Accent color is shown when I select a list here and you could see it also when I go into Preferences. Of course when I select text I can see the Highlight color. So in System Preferences if I change that to purple and red now I could see here purple in the selection here on the left and when I select some text you could see red is the Highlight color. Calendar is another app that makes a lot of use of color. Every Calendar here has its own colors. So this is set to green and this is set to purple. So most of the colors you're going to see are the calendar colors themselves. But you will see, when you go into an event, the Highlight color like that and you will see in Preferences the Accent color. In addition to that this bright red here to indicate the current date in the main calendar and also in the mini calendar at the bottom left. There's no way I could see the change that red. Notes uses yellow as its Accent color. You could see it here when I select something in the Sidebar or a note here and then you could see the Highlight color right there. If I go into System Preferences and change that to say green and purple then you could see now it will use green and purple. How about third party apps? Well, if you go into an app like this you'll see there's not much color in it since its in TextEditor but there is a Highlight color and when you go to Preferences you can clearly see the Accent color there. It will obey the system changes here so if I change to pink and yellow you could see now I get pink and yellow. Here in Pixelmator you could see that I can select some text and it does a blue Highlight. You don't see much color here but if you switch to something else, like maybe the Text Panel, you could see the blue Accent color. If I go into System Preferences and change that to yellow and green now you could see yellow is the Accent. But for whatever reason Pixelmator uses the Accent color for highlighting text as well. So it doesn't seem to use the Highlight color. But I will see here if i go to Preferences and then I go to something where I can actually select text you can see it's using green there. So the system oriented controls are using it correctly. But in this third party app actually selecting text in the graphic is going to use the Accent color for some reason. So third party apps really have a lot of control over this. If a third party app isn't obeying these settings there's really nothing you can do about it except maybe file a bug report. So hopefully that gives you a deeper understanding of what Accent Color and Highlight Color are. There is no way to set it on a per App basis. You're only options are to set one or both of these to the first option so that the apps get to use their own default Accent or Highlight color. Or to customize the Accent Color and Highlight Color to what you want so that all apps use them. Note that you can set the Accent Color to follow the defaults for each app. You can change the Highlight Color to something else so all apps follow that Highlight Color. But you can't do the opposite. You can't set the Accent Color to something and then tell the Highlight Color to follow what each app wants. Once you've set an Accent Color you have to set the Highlight Color to something. In the end this is all just a personal preference. Some people like the fact that each app has its own color scheme. Others want to use a specific color scheme throughout all of their apps. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: System Settings (161 videos) Related Video Tutorials: How To Create Web Links That Highlight Text ― Understanding CSV Files ― Understanding Curly and Straight Quotes
