A while back (6 years ago 😲) I talked about how you can change the behavior of SSMS so that the pinned tabs have their own row across the top of the screen. In fact, if you have a bunch of pinned tabs then they will wrap so they are all always visible. There are some definite up sides and down sides to that, but anyway.

I use this all of the time. I have a solution in SSMS to store all of the queries I use on a regular basis. I open one of the queries and then pin it to the top to keep it sperate from the rest of my sometimes literally dozens of queries. Things like my query to figure out where the backups for this instance are, and my diagnostic queries are almost always up there at the top left. So I open the file, pin the file. A few days later when I end up re-opening SSMS I open the file, and I pin the file. Not hard, but rather repetitive.

The other day though I found a fantastic option.

Right there under the Options->Tabs and Windows->Pinned Tabs section is Maintain pin status if document is removed from the well. From what I can tell the well is the area were the tabs are shown. And now that I’ve checked that option any time I open up one of those files (that I’ve pinned before) it now automatically shows up in the separate row for pinned tabs. (Note that this option appears to be available in Visual Studio but I haven’t been able to find it in Azure Data Studio.)

I mean I’ll admit this isn’t some kind of revolutionary thing, but I’m sure finding it handy.