That's exactly what I do too. 'SELECT * FROM', then write the rest of the query, then double back and replace the * at the end.

Is it ideal? No. But it's muscle memory now, so...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, that's a great idea. What editor/ui do you use? Since I've got divorced from Jetbrains I miss Datagrip ...

Why the divorce? DataGrip has been the best database-gui that I've ever used.

I had the all-tools subscription for years (working mainly on Spring Boot and Angular projects) and IntelliJ and Webstorm were fantastic. Then I started Vue projects and later on Svelte and the Webstorm support for both (and Tailwind btw.) has been a disaster. Esp. how they handled the countless issues created by me and many others. Many other small annoyances like no support for international keyboards with dead keys on Linux and esp. how support handled it.

So, I had to move to VS Code for Vue and Svelte and as I didn't want to use 2 different IDEs I canceled my JB subscription. So far VS Code is pretty good for Goland and Rust as well, but as you said, I struggle to find something as good as DataGrip for SQL. Maybe I should just get a DataGrip license (single tool).

Edit: I forgot another issue ... DataGrip didn't support the latest SQLite version for a very long time, as the maintainer for the open source Java client wasn't working on it. When I dared to ask the JB support a second time for the status after a while, I got a stroppy reply from the responsible Jetbrains engineer, as how I dare asking twice and there's nothing Jebrains could do when the single person maintainer of an open source lib is doing other stuff with his life. Crazy.

vscode. mssql plugin because that's what I'm dealing with.