SSMS Tips and Tricks 2-7: Making sense of the colors in the SSMS scroll bar

In an earlier post, I described how I didn’t particularly like all the colors that are shown in the scroll bar now in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):

In that post, I described how to turn them all off, or at least how to kill off some of them. But, of course they are there for a reason.

Instead of turning them all off, you might decide to make sense of what they are there for. The colors that are displayed indicate the following:

• Red - this is showing where syntax errors appear in your code
• Blue - this shows where the cursor currently is. That’s helpful when you have scrolled but haven’t moved the cursor. However, given this is the most useful one for me, I have to say that when all the other colors are present, it’s the one that I find hard to locate.
• Yellow - this is indicating changes that you have made but have not yet saved.
• Green - this is showing saved changes.
• Maroon - this shows the location of “marks” - for us this means breakpoints.
• Black - this shows bookmarks.

And remember that you can change which ones are displayed by right clicking the scroll bar and changing its settings.

2025-06-14