Keyboard shortcut to surround a column name with [ and ]

Question

I'm wondering if there's a keyboard shortcut in SSMS to surround a selected column name (or an uninterupted sequence of characters for the given cursor position) with the [ and ] chars.

So if I have user_id and would press something like CTRL + SHIFT + [ + ] it would turn into [user_id]. Is there such a keyboard shortcut?

Answer 1

There's no keyboard shortcut out of the box that surrounds text in brackets, but you can you create your own using a custom snippet. You can check out this blog post to get clear steps but I'll list them briefly here.

Open notepad and paste in this xml. Save it as brackets.snippet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>  
<CodeSnippets  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">  
<_locDefinition xmlns="urn:locstudio">  
    <_locDefault _loc="locNone" />  
    <_locTag _loc="locData">Title</_locTag>  
    <_locTag _loc="locData">Description</_locTag>  
    <_locTag _loc="locData">Author</_locTag>  
    <_locTag _loc="locData">ToolTip</_locTag>  
   <_locTag _loc="locData">Default</_locTag>  
</_locDefinition>  
<CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">  
<Header>  
<Title>Brackets</Title>  
                        <Shortcut>br</Shortcut>  
<Description>Snippet for Brackets</Description>  
<Author>SQL Super Hero</Author>  
<SnippetTypes>  
                                <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType>  
</SnippetTypes>  
</Header>  
<Snippet>  
<Declarations>  
                                <Literal>  
                                <ID>OpenBracket</ID>  
                                <Default>[</Default>  
                                </Literal>  

                                <Literal>  
                                <ID>CloseBracket</ID>  
                                <Default>]</Default>  
                                </Literal>  
</Declarations>  
<Code Language="SQL"><![CDATA[$OpenBracket$$selected$$CloseBracket$$end$]]>  
</Code>  
</Snippet>  
</CodeSnippet>  
</CodeSnippets>

In SSMS, Go to Tools > Code Snippets Manager.

Click import. Find the Brackets.snippet file and click Open

Choose “My Code Snippets” as the location and click finish

Close and reopen SQL Server Management Studio

You should now be able to use the snippet to surround highlighted text in brackets. The keyboard shortcut to access the snippet is ctrl+k, ctrl+s

The most efficient way to do this is with the following sequence of key presses:

Highlight Desired Text > Ctrl+K,Ctrl+S > M > Enter > Enter > Enter