Let me cut to the chase. If you are like me, you may have been searching for: How to turn on Dark Mode in SSMS V21. Searching for that very thing today inspired me to write this blog to help others do the same thing because I couldn’t seem to find an easy answer.

The process is really easy, but it doesn’t exactly start you in the face until you know that Dark Mode isn’t a box you check, or even really a thing. Rather it is a mode. Open SSMS V21, go to the Tools Menu\Options. And in the tree choose Environment\General. Now, choose your Visual Experience and choose Dark and voila: Dark Mode:

It isn’t 100% there in this preview… there are dialogs that don’t respond to the color changes at this time. Like the Options window, but as long as the code editor is dark, I am pretty good. For example, the Options dialog still has the default color:

I don’t know why it was so hard to find, but when I was just about to go to the couch and just Mario Kart the morning away, I decided to search once more and Brent Ozar had a post about SSMS that let me to the right place.

If they weren’t able to fix some of the dialogs colors, I would not really care. The most important thing is the actual coding experience. (I am writing on a 32 inch monitor in WordPress with a white background and it is sort of killing my eyes :))

Only a minor quibble so far

The only thing that I wasn’t keen on was the grid results. The font started a bit small on my monitor, and the lines around the values that were output seemed really bright.

The default font size for the grid was a 7 point Microsoft Sans Serif font. While 7 is good for a lot of results, the grid doesn’t have a way to zoom in, and my eyesight is, let’s call it complicated. So I set it to 12 and basically left it with the proportional font. You can change the font in Tools\Options, then choose Environment\Fonts and Colors. Find Show Settings for: and finally: Grid Results.

If I have to do this very often, I will most likely be programming a macro into by StreamDeck that will click into all of those menus!

The only problem so far with dark mode for me has been that the grid basically became a high contrast color, that kind of hurt my eyes for different reasons than the big bright screen.

There is quite a bit of light shining back around what I am trying to read, though it is not as bad at a larger font (and worth it for the rest of the screen to not be like staring at a light bulb.)

You can play around with the colors, fonts, and font size for the grid if you have issues (or just a personal preference!) On that same dialog you can change the background and font size for values and for NULL values. So I did a bit of change up:

And that is kind of better.

I typically output to text, and that still is larger or smaller based on the code font size, which you can change with your mouse wheel

Overall First Impressions of SSMS 21?

I am using the Preview 3.0 version, and there is really only one thing I don’t care for at all.

The Icon

The icon:

And look, it isn’t because it isn’t better, more modern, or that it looks like all the other icons they have put out for newer data tools. It is because this is what I am looking for when I want to query my data:

But seriously

The best compliment I can give a new version of a tool like SSMS that I have spent so much time with over the years is this “It still feels like home, with a few renovations.”

One really nice thing I noticed when I decided to do some writing about it today was the upgrade experience. I think there may be more improvements to come, but updating from the first preview I had installed was so much easier than before. It is not yet as easy as Visual Studio Code/Azure Data Studio, but I just looked for updates in the menu, and it did the rest without going to a download page.

That step always was a bit of a pain, so too often I just said “Bah” and moved on.

Overall, I am just excited to see what comes next.