1) Change the Font. Developers like to indent and line up their code to make it more readable. Why deliver the product with a default font that isn’t fixed width, therefore making this harder? The first change I make is to swap the font (Tools > Preferences > Code Editor > Fonts) for Lucida Console, 11pts – although the font size may vary depending upon monitor resolution and the state of your eyesight.

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3) Syntax Colours. Picking a better colour scheme eases readability as you’ll be able to pick out strings, operators and brackets/braces quicker but the delivered scheme highlights keywords in bold, which throws out the alignment if you’ve pick a fixed-width font. I normally make the following changes (Tools > Preferences > Code Editor > Syntax Colours):

• Remove the bold highlight from ‘Default Element Name’ and ‘Default Keyword’.
• Change Default Separator to purple
• Change Default String to red
• Uncheck ‘Enable highlight’ against Current SQL

I also use several of the Toolbar Shortcuts he mentions, such as F9 to execute SQL queries.

Thanks for the great article, Duncan!