I understand going into Layout > Page Background > Solid Fill, however this only changes it for the current document. I considered setting an action to change it for every document - but this is sill cumbersome and doesn't always work well.
Under customization
This only changes the area around the artboard.. Looking to find an application wide change to be able to have the default white space of an artboard to be slightly grey instead.. This doesn't achieve my goal, but thanks for the tip.
As mentioned in the description of the question, I am already aware of this option - however, this is only document specific and I am in search of an application wide setting/solution. I considered setting an action to change this setting that would then need clicked every time you open a document - however, I would still like to achieve (if possible) a point where I can open any document and the background is already grey. Thank you
Sorry, I haven't played with the options that much. One should be able to create a couple of macros to this. One Document Open & one for Document New.