Sublime Text 4 – Disable Inactive File Pane/Tab Dimming

Sublime Text 3 auto-upgraded to Sublime Text 4 on my laptop on May 20, 2021.

There are a ton of awesome new features in Sublime Text 4, but I’ve also found a few things that I want to change.

Inactive Pane Dimming is the official feature name but the setting name is “Inactive Sheet Dimming” — you may also see it called “inactive tab dimming” or “sublime text 4 tab highlighting”.

Inactive Pane Dimming is when you have 2 or more tabs open side-by-side, and when you click on one, it dims the other ones.

Method 1: Disable Inactive Pane/Sheet Dimming

You can disable Inactive Pane Dimming by the following steps:

1. Click “Preferences” > “Settings”
2. On the right, add the following to your settings:

"inactive_sheet_dimming": false,

This should appear within the settings curly braces, so for example mine looks like this:

{
  "tab_size": 2,
  "theme": "Default.sublime-theme",
  "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
  "inactive_sheet_dimming": false,
}

You may need to restart Sublime Text 4.

Method 2: Change file tabs back to Sublime Text 3 angled appearance

Alternatively, you can disable it implicitly by changing the file tabs back to their Sublime Text 3 appearance, which will also disable the dimming between tabs.

1. Click “Preferences” > “Settings”
2. On the right, add the following to your settings:

"file_tab_style": "angled",

This should appear within the settings curly braces, so for example mine looks like this:

{
  "tab_size": 2,
  "theme": "Default.sublime-theme",
  "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
  "file_tab_style": "angled",
}

You may need to restart Sublime Text 4.