Go to Matching Brace in Visual Studio?

Is there a way in Visual Studio 2008 to go from a closing brace to its opening brace? I've found a fair amount of stuff about highlighting the brace, but nothing about moving the cursor to it.

(VB.NET version of this Question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/7888108/740639)

I found this for you: Jump between braces in Visual Studio:

> Put your cursor before or after the brace (your choice) and then press CTRL + ]. It works with parentheses ( ), brackets [ ] and braces { }. From now on you don’t need to play Where’s Waldo? to find that brace.

With the above shortcut, you can also hold SHIFT to select.

On MacOS, use CMD + SHIFT + \ .

I use Visual Studio 2008, and you can customize what you want this shortcut to be.

Click menu Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard. Then look for Edit.GotoBrace.

This will tell you what key combination is currently assigned for this. I think you can change this if you want, but it's useful if the Ctrl + ] doesn't work.

Use CTRL + ] to switch between them. Place the cursor at one of the braces when using it.

Note: It also works for #if / #elif / #endif matching. The caret must be on the #.

If for some reason this is NOT working for you, something may have messed up your keyboard bindings (it didn't work for me). You can re-enable the binding easy enough though - at least so I thought:

I tried this procedure:

• Go to menu Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard
• Scroll to, or search for the command Edit.GotoBrace
• Assign the desired shortcut (mine was empty, so I put in CTRL    + ])
• Be sure to click the "Assign Button"

I tried it, and it still didn't work. I restarted Visual Studio, and it still didn't work - well it ONLY worked for .cs files, but I need it to work for .vb files and text files, and...well ALL files!

On my French keyboard, it's CTRL + ^.

On a German keyboard it's Ctrl + ´.

On a Spanish keyboard it is CTRL + ¿ (or CTRL + ¡).

On my Danish keyboard it's CTRL + Å.

And Ctrl + Shift + ] will select all of the text.

On a Turkish keyboard, it is Ctrl + ü.

For completeness sake, on a Swedish keyboard it's CTRL + å .

Also, I guess logical, but worth mentioning CTRL + shift + å (for capital Å), selects everything inside the braces and goes to the matching one.

On my Portuguese keyboard and SO with EN VS, it's CTRL + « to navigate to matching brace and CTRL + SHIFT + « if you intend to select the inner code.

On my pt-BR (Brazilian Portuguese) keyboard it is actually CTRL + [.

On my Italian keyboard, it's CTRL + ^.

On my Slovenian keyboard it is ALT    + Đ

For Visual Studio Code (as seen in their documentation), use Ctrl+Shift+</kbd>.

The setting can be found in:

> File/Preferences/Keyboard Shortcut

I am using Visual Studio Code 1.8.0 . Note Visual Studio Code may behave differently for international keyboards (as seen in this answer re: German keyboard)

Hope this helps someone.

On a Mac use command+shift+</kbd>.

Source: a comment on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37877082/3345085. Tested in Visual Studio Code version 1.10.2.

On my Dutch (Belgian) keyboard, it's CTRL + ^.

Goto Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors, select the "Brace Matching (Rectangle)" and change the "Item Background" to e.g. Yellow. This worked for the C# parentheses () {} and [].

Details that can benefit everyone (Linux/Win/Mac)

The command in the keyboard shortcuts menu/editor is editor.action.jumpToBracket there you can set it to whatever you like. There is also one called editor.action.selectToBracket which has no shortcut by default (at least on Mac).

Etc.

On the Mac editor.action.jumpToBracket starts out as Cmd+Shift+\ and I changed it to Ctrl+] to be in line with what others say here. I did so in the hopes that I could use Ctrl+Shift+] to "Extend selection to matching bracket". That is what lead me to discover the details above. I set editor.action.selectToBracket to Ctrl+Shift+] and got exactly the behavior I wanted.

On a Hungarian keyboard it is Ctrl + ú.

A bit relevant, but for HTML tags: (since there is no built-in solution, Ctrl + J doesn't work for HTML tags : )

Here is the answer as a macro which I've built which does it (toggle), including go to focus:

Here is the demo:

And here is the code. Enjoy!

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports EnvDTE90a
Imports EnvDTE100
Imports System.Diagnostics
Imports System.Windows.Forms

Public Module Module2
    Sub beginToEnd()

        'Place the cursor somewhere in the beginning tag, run the macro, to select from beginning to end tag

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.SelectLine()
        Dim objSel As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection
        Dim topPoint As TextPoint = objSel.TopPoint
        Dim lTopLine As Long = topPoint.Line
        objSel.GotoLine(lTopLine, False)
        '  DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine()
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.SelectLine()
        Dim line1 As String = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text()

        If InStr(line1, "/") Then

            ' MsgBox(line1)
            DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")
            DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()
            DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(vsStartOfLineOptions.vsStartOfLineOptionsFirstText, True)
            objSel.GotoLine(lTopLine, False)
            DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")
            DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")
        Else
            DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")
            DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(False)
            DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.ToggleOutliningExpansion")
        End If

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.SelectLine()
        Dim line2 As String = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text()
        Dim objSel3 As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection
        Dim topPoint3 As TextPoint = objSel3.TopPoint
        Dim lTopLine3 As Long = topPoint3.Line
        objSel.GotoLine(lTopLine3, False)
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(vsStartOfLineOptions.vsStartOfLineOptionsFirstText, False)
    End Sub
End Module

In Visual Studio Code on german keyboard it's ctrl+shift+^

But you have to open a file with correct extension - it's not working in new unsaved files for example.

On the Swiss-French keyboard : use CTRL + SHIFT + ^

On Spanish (Spain) keyboard with VS2012 is Ctrl + ¡ as stated by @Keith but if you use Ctrl + ¿ (typed as Ctrl + Shift + ¡) then goes to Matching Brace plus selects all the code within the two braces and then you can't go again to the other brace.

June 2021

On a Mac running Windows 10 under parallels for Visual Studio 2019 and c# and with US keyboard the solution which worked for me was to edit the shortcut in" Tools Options Keyboard Edit.GoToBrace

On my system that shortcut was blank...

Press the Ctl key and the ] key and save the shortcut