Toggling Light / Dark App Environment Setting From the App Possible?

[Carbonsquare]

Greetings fellow Gliders. A similar question was asked back in 2019 from another developer, but wondering if there has been any new update on this.

Is there a simple way to “toggle” a Glide App Appearance settings for a “Light” or “DarK” Environment AND/OR the Background setting for “Highlight” or “Neutral” using the result of and IF THEN ELSE or a SWITCH setting?

We wish to be able to flip back and forth between Light and Dark app Environment from the app on the fly without needing to alter this setting in the Glide back-end. Not users performing this (as in matching a user device theme settings) but our development team performing this function. Thoughts?

[Himaladin]

You can do this with a CSS-based approach, using an IF THEN ELSE or SWITCH in Glide to control the theme.

I discussed the concept of switching Glide’s Light and Dark environments dynamically here:

CSS Hack: Switching Dark - Light Environment Mode

This CSS trick successfully switches between Dark and Light environments inside Glide — tested directly in the DOM (not in the custom CSS field). I’m not sharing the full code here since it’s quite long, but the concept is fully replicable. [ScreenRecording2025-09-30131621-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter] How it works: Set your app’s base appearance to either Dark or Light under Settings → Appearance. Create a flag column in your User Profile table that stores which button (Dark/Light) …

The post documents the concept and approach rather than the full CSS code. The original implementation was quite extensive because it required overriding multiple parts of Glide’s UI.

For your particular use case, I would actually consider using dynamic theme colors rather than trying to reproduce the entire Light/Dark environment. It is much simpler to manage and can still be driven by a Glide condition or SWITCH.

Here is another example where I used :has() to respond to app state and dynamically change theme colors:

CSS Hack: Role-Based App Themes

Here’s a simple dynamic CSS trick to make your Glide app’s theme automatically change based on user roles — like admin, member, vip or banned. By declaring global CSS variables and using the :is() selector to shorten rules — together with :has() for data-driven conditions — you can keep your CSS clean, dynamic, and highly scalable. [ScreenRecording2025-11-01112758-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter] 1. Global Variable Declaration Define role-based color variables that …

So the general pattern is:

Glide condition / SWITCH → expose the state in the DOM → CSS responds to that state → theme changes dynamically.

This can be adapted for a development toggle controlled from within the app, without changing the setting in the Glide builder.

[Carbonsquare]

Thank you very much for this response!