How to turn on dark mode in Oracle SQL Developer

dark two settings Why there is no one switch

Oracle SQL Developer is built on Oracle’s JDeveloper platform, and that platform separates syntax highlighting from the look and feel of the window itself. Changing one leaves the other alone. If you have followed an instruction that only darkened the code area, or only the menus, this is why.

• Editor colours — the SQL text, keywords, comments and the worksheet background.
• Application chrome — menus, toolbars, panel backgrounds, dialogs and the Connections tree.

dark editor Darkening the editor

1. Open Tools → Preferences.
2. Go to Code Editor → PL/SQL Syntax Colors.
3. Choose a dark option from the Scheme dropdown at the top.
4. Apply. The change is immediate — no restart needed for editor colours.

The built-in schemes are limited, and how many you see depends on your release. This is the setting most guides mean when they say Oracle SQL Developer “has dark mode”, and on its own it gives you a dark worksheet inside a light window.

dark chrome Darkening the rest of the window

The surrounding interface follows the Java look and feel, set under Tools → Preferences → Environment. Which options appear depends on your platform and the Java version in use, so this is the part that varies most between machines — and the part that needs a restart before it fully applies.

dark themes Community themes

Because the built-in choices are thin, several community colour schemes exist and are more thorough than anything shipped by default. Dracula is the best known, and Solarized Dark ports are widely used too.

These import into the same Scheme dropdown as the built-in options, which means they colour the editor and not the chrome. Combining a community scheme with a dark look and feel gets you closest to a fully dark application.

dark os Does it follow the system theme?

No. Switching macOS or Windows to dark mode does not change Oracle SQL Developer, and there is no setting that makes it track the operating system. Both settings above are manual and stored in your user profile, so they persist across restarts but do not respond to the system.

They also live outside the application folder, in ~/.sqldeveloper/ or %APPDATA%\sqldeveloper, which means a new version installed alongside can import them rather than starting from a light default again.

dark what stays What stays light whatever you do

Some parts of Oracle SQL Developer ignore both settings, and knowing which saves you hunting for a preference that does not exist:

• Result grids often keep a light background even with a dark editor scheme, because the grid is a separate component from the SQL text area.
• Some dialogs — connection properties, preferences itself — are drawn by the platform and may not follow the look and feel.
• Reports and the data modeller tend to render light regardless.
• Embedded help is HTML and uses its own styling.

If a fully dark interface matters more to you than Oracle-specific tooling, this is one of the honest reasons people run a different client for everyday querying — the comparison with DBeaver covers that trade-off, since DBeaver inherits Eclipse theming and goes dark completely.

dark reset Undoing it

Set the Scheme dropdown back to the default and revert the look and feel, then restart. If a community theme has left the editor unreadable and you cannot see the menus well enough to fix it, deleting the version folder under ~/.sqldeveloper/ resets every preference to factory defaults — including your saved connections, so export those first if they matter.