Getting the Current Colour Scheme from the CLI

To get the current colour scheme from the CLI, use the following command:

defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle

If MacOS is in dark mode, this will print Dark. But if MacOS is in light mode, this key won’t be set at all, and the command will print return an error of the form:

2022-10-04 09:15:18.058 defaults[35844:466643] 
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleInterfaceStyle) does not exist

As such, in order to confirm that the colour scheme is light, you’ll need to parse for this error.