I haven’t been a big fan of dark mode in many tools, but I’ve been giving it a try in some applications as my eyes age. I decided to try it in SSMS, which wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.
I had heard this was coming, then found some notes it wasn’t coming, and eventually landed on Pinal Dave’s blog that shows how to enable it. I followed the instructions, but had this issue in Sublime Text.
That’s easy to fix. In my case, I didn’t want to restart Sublime in administrator mode, nor did I want to mess with permissions. I decided to use VS Code, since that’s the other default program that appears with many files. I started it in admin mode:
I accepted the UAC dialog and then clicked File | Open. From there, I pasted in this path: C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 18Common7IDE
I picked ssms.pkgundef and opened it. Uncommented the last line for the dark theme and saved the file. Then I restarted SSMS and:
Voila!
ish. Not everything is dark.
This one is particularly annoying to me.
I did try to alter some items, such as my grid results:
This somewhat works:
I’ll stick with it for a bit, but I’ll have to see how much the white sections bother me, especially with the Object Explorer.
I don’t know why this is so hard, or why it’s a low priority. When I look at some of the feedback and posts, this is upsetting to plenty of people and it would seem like something that shouldn’t be hard to fix. However, I know this is a thick, old client, and perhaps no one wants to touch the code? I’ve certainly seen that before in other orgs. Perhaps Microsoft isn’t so different.