Google Docs still opens as a bright white page at 2am. DocsNight fixes that specifically — Docs, Sheets and Drive, no flash, no fighting the canvas renderer, under 50KiB, zero network requests.
Generic dark-mode extensions invert or filter the DOM — and Google Docs doesn't render its page as normal DOM. Large parts of the editor are drawn on canvas, which generic filters either miss entirely or mangle. DocsNight targets Docs and Drive specifically, so the editor, menus, and canvas layer stay legible together.
Toggle instantly with Alt+Shift+D, or set a default and forget it.
No frameworks, no bundler runtime shipped to the browser, no telemetry to phone home to. The whole extension is lighter than the favicon of most sites it's meant to darken.
DocsNight is distributed directly for now — Chrome won't install a downloaded .zip in one click, so it's a short manual load:
Download the .zip above and unzip it anywhere on disk.
Open chrome://extensions in a new tab.
Turn on Developer mode (top-right toggle).
Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
The theme stopped being about the document editor only: it now covers
every surface of docs.google.com, Google Sheets included.
/document/u/0/, /spreadsheets/u/0/) go dark too, while document thumbnails keep their original colors.body, outside every themed container./document/d/* to all of docs.google.com. No new permissions — the host was already in host_permissions.Dark UI is now built by inverting whole containers instead of repainting individual elements — the old approach left white islands with grey text on them.
body and the old rules never reached them.100%) and the menu-search suggestions were grey-on-white.filter creates a stacking context).First build available for download.
Images inside a Docs page look like a negative in Invert mode.
The page content is painted into a single <canvas> raster — there is no
separate image element left to give the colors back to. Switch that document to
Dim or None and the pictures are correct again. Fixing this
properly would mean reading and reprocessing your document pixel by pixel, which is exactly
what this extension refuses to do — so it stays a deliberate limitation, not a bug on a list.
Slides and Forms editors stay light. They have no selector map yet; a half-painted interface is worse than an untouched one.
Natively dark bits of Drive turn light (the sync toast) — a side effect of inverting the whole page.
There's a full manual acceptance guide — smoke checks, happy paths, filter modes, Drive, edge cases, privacy checks and a bug report template.