Mawu’s dark styling reaches further than a typical admin color scheme, because two of the surfaces WordPress core’s own dark schemes skip entirely, the block editor canvas and the Classic Editor, get dedicated coverage here. Here’s exactly what’s covered and how.
The admin bar and menu
Hand-painted directly in the plugin’s own stylesheet, scoped to whichever theme is active. This is the “normal” way a color scheme works, the same surface every core WordPress scheme (Midnight, Ectoplasm, Ocean) covers.
The main dashboard content area
This is where Mawu goes further than a typical color scheme. Rather than a hand-picked list of screens, the content area is recolored per-element in real time, the same technique real dark-mode browser extensions use: read each element’s actual computed color, flip it appropriately, and keep watching for new content as you navigate. The practical effect is that this reaches other plugins’ admin screens too, not just core WordPress pages, since it’s reading real colors rather than matching a fixed list of selectors.
The block editor’s writing canvas
WordPress’s own dark color schemes stop at the toolbar and sidebar; the actual page you write on stays a bright white iframe regardless of which core scheme is active. Mawu specifically targets the writing canvas itself, so both the chrome and the content area you’re typing into go dark together.
The Classic Editor
For sites still running the Classic Editor plugin, both the TinyMCE toolbar and its writing area get dedicated dark styling, matching whichever theme is active.
The Customizer
Appearance → Customize gets dark styling for the panel shell and section/panel titles. On themes with an unusually large number of Customizer panels, some individual control labels only go fully dark once you interact with that panel rather than immediately on load, a known, minor limitation rather than a bug.
The login screen, optionally
wp-login.php can be styled dark too, toggled separately under Settings → Mawu Dark Mode, since it’s the one screen with no logged-in user to read a theme preference from.
For what’s deliberately out of scope, see does Mawu affect my site’s visitors? and known gaps and what’s not covered yet.