Visual Studio 2013: Matching Braces

This next feature only applies to C++ and C# just so you know. There are four things I want to talk about: highlighting, moving, selecting, and defining matching braces.

 

Highlighting

If you have any code with matching braces:

 

You can put your cursor to the left of any brace and it will highlight the matching one:

 

 

 

Moving

If you want to move the cursor from one brace to another simply press CTRL+] (close bracket) to jump, forward or backward, between them:

 

 

 

Selecting

If you press CTRL+SHIFT+] (close bracket) then it will not only jump to the matching brace but will highlight everything between the braces as well:

 

 

 

Defining

Lastly, the definition of “brace” is very loose and applies to square brackets, curly braces, and parentheses:

 

So feel free to use this feature set with just about any type of brace.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 03, 2014
  Seems to be a bug with the highlighting code. I found it extremely confusing that the dark blue highlight color is so similar to the selected-text color, so I changed it to a dark red -- but for some reason in CSS files it still uses dark blue.