Is there any way to extend the editor in SSMS?

Question

Can the SQL Server Management Studio text editor be extended? If it's possible, what kind of work & tools are involved?

I find myself frequently jumping to other editors for certain kinds of text manipulation, and then jumping back to SSMS. If it were possible to extend the SSMS editor, I might do so.

The first feature I would add would be a "column mode" where you could operate on rectangles of text. UltraEdit, Emacs and few other editors have this feature. I find it invaluable for editing SQL.

Answer 1

Yes. Have a look at SSMS Toolpack for a bunch of very usefull features add-on to SSMS.

Also see SQL Server 2008 Extended Events SSMS Addin on codeplex, you can brose the sources and see how the SSMS add in are codded.

Note that historycaly the SSMS add-in interface was broken by the SP releases a number of times.

Answer 2

You can do box selections in SSMS by holding down the Alt key.

You can do Alt + select text with the mouse, or Alt + Shift + select text with the cursor keys.

Answer 3

There are lots of ways to hack into SSMS as described above but the reality is that there's no supported way (at present) to extend SSMS. That means that whatever you do could easily break in the next update or service pack.

We've all been harassing the SQL Server team for this for a long time. Please add your voice to the calls for extensibility in SSMS.