Phil Factor

28 November 2019

• SQL Prompt
• SQL Refactoring
• SQL Formatting and Styles

SQL Prompt by Keyboard

When you need to work quickly with SQL Prompt, the most obvious time-savers are the keyboard shortcuts. Certainly, when I’m programming in SQL, I really don’t want to have to point and click the whole time so there really isn’t much of an alternative to learning those keystrokes. Ironically, currently the most straightforward way of learning the shortcuts is to from the point-and click menu options; the Prompt menu, and the context menu are where most of them are shown. Even then, there are some things that you just have to know.

I’ll provide some diagrams to help to…err…prompt you with the right keystrokes when you find yourself having to reach for the mouse when it isn’t necessary. Both diagrams are available to download, as PDF wallcharts, at the bottom of the article.

The Essential Keyboard Shortcuts

Having selected some code in a query pane in SSMS, the most useful key to hit is Ctrl. This gets you to the Prompt Action menu, and by tapping the relevant keys, you can bring up the action you want and then tap Enter. This gets you a long way, and it pays to avoid these useful key sequences when assigning snippet codes to snippets.

Controversially, perhaps, I keep Prompt’s Suggestions box and column picker in “quiet mode” (enabled, but set not to pop up automatically). I can then request them “on demand”, using Ctrl+Space, whenever I find that I want suggestions, which is often.

When I’m doing SELECT statements, I like pressing Tab to expand wildcards. To do this, you must give Prompt the context. Write the SELECT statement, including the FROM clause, but missing out the column list. Go back and write the wildcard character ‘*’ and then hit the Tab Key. Whoosh! In goes the entire column list, qualified with the name or alias of the origin table source.

I use the Tab History feature a lot. To invoke that. You quickly learn Ctrl+Q to see the contents of the open tabs. You can then flick between the Tab history and the SSMS windows with the Alt key. The real power comes when you learn to navigate between All Tabs, Open and Closed with Ctrl and either or , and navigate between tabs with and .

The Keystroke Keyboard Diagram

If you are visually oriented, like me, a diagram is a nice way to learn these keystrokes and helps you to see the patterns. For example, it shows how Ctrl+B is the gateway to a whole range of reformatting and refactoring functionality.

I’ve highlighted the letters that provide the mnemonic that helps you to remember the right set of characters to hit on that keyboard.

The Keystroke Taxonomy

There is a lot of functionality in SQL Prompt, and a lot of this functionality can be accessed via keystrokes. The keyboard diagram is useful for some of the common actions, but in the end, you need a list, because there is too much there. Here’s the table showing all the Prompt functionality by menu and by keystroke. The Wallchart PDF, which you can download at the bottom, is much prettier….

Summary

The SQL Prompt keyboard shortcuts are important, but they aren’t always the sort of thing you discover by using Prompt and they aren’t always easy to remember even if you do discover them. I’ve tried to show how you can get to grips with learning them by wallcharts instead, with the assistance of mnemonics where possible. If I’ve managed to introduce you to some SQL Prompt functionality that you haven’t yet discovered, then that is a bonus.