Resetting SSMS shortcut keys in SQL Server “Denali” CTP 3

If you did what I did when you installed CTP 3 of SQL Server “Denali” (which happened when I uninstalled CTP 1 then installed CTP 3) you’ll be in for a rude surprise, a lot of your shortcut keys that you’ve been using for years don’t work any more.  This is to say the least VERY annoying, and shouldn’t have ever happened.  If you upgrade you won’t have this problem as it’ll take your old shortcut key settings.

It isn’t all that hard to fix, provided that you know what each and every hot key was supposed to be you can go into Tools > Options then Environment > Keyboard > General and reset all the keys that are hosed up.

Or you can download the settings file that I’ve put together that has (I think) all the screwed up hot keys corrected.  Safe this file on your computer somewhere and uncompress it, then click on Tools > Import and Export Settings.  Run through the wizard (be sure to safe your current settings in case it really screws something up) then import my file.  Now all your shortcut keys “should” work as expected.

If you find a shortcut key that I missed please put it in the comments below, or let me know in some other way and I’ll get the file updated.

Denny

P.S. I’ve sent a nasty note to some of my SQL Server development team contacts.  I’ve also submitted a connect item so that feedback can be publicly collected.

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2 Responses

  1. To venture a wild guess – could it be that by default, SSMS now has the same hot keys as VS? Like, execute would be CTRL+ALT+E instead of ALT+X, CTRL+E, CTRL+C will comment the selection etc.? That would actually make sense. I move between VS and SSMS a lot, and the difference is confusing. I would rather relearn and have one set. It would be nice though if they came up with a way to use the new hot keys in older versions of SSMS though…

  2. Yep, that would be the exact problem. For people that move between SSMS and VS it makes sense to have the hot keys be the same. However for those of us that never work in VS we don’t know or care about the VS hot keys. Since the VS hot keys are the ones which are now the defaults it makes it pretty hard to use SSMS. You can edit the vssetting file in SQL 2008 R2 and change the hot keys in there. In SQL Denali they put a UI in place to help with this.

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