Removed hyphen from word_separators, ctrl+d no longer makes sense

Question

I removed the - from the word_separators setting, and that works fine.

But ctrl + d on the word a still matches the "a" in a-b, I don't want it to do that anymore.

It's because ctrl + d wraps your search with regex boundaries \b, and - is still considered a boundary.

Is there anything I can do to now make ctrl + d not consider - a boundary anymore.

EDIT: picture:

The "a" in a-b should not be highlighted, as a-b is a single variable name in this language, which is why I removed the - from word_separators

More clarification: If I'm trying to replace all instance of the variable a, I don't want it matching against parts of other variables, like the "a" in a-b.

Haigh

Can you post an example of what's happening and what's the expected editor behavior ? – Lorsung

@Amir Sure, I added a picture to my question – Haigh

why don't you find 'a' by selecting a with the white space. Or by doing Ctrl + f to find this regex pattern a ? – Lorsung

@Amir Selecting with whitespace isn't what I want to do, and that regex pattern is worse than what ctrl+d is doing now. That would match any a character anywhere – Haigh

word_separators from the manual: "In some contexts, the text might be tokenized based on other criteria (for example, the syntax definition rules)." – Zapateado

Did you highlight a before doing the multiple selection? I know highlighting before selecting will search for the selection, not an exact match. – Motivation

Answer 1

From what I can tell from some informal experimenting while answering your other question, the "word_separators" setting seems to primarily relevant when double-clicking to select words. For example, I have the following words in a file:

and my word_separators list is ./\\()\"'-:,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$, so it includes - and / but not _. If I put my cursor in the first foo (without selecting the whole word first) and hit CtrlD, I get

and if I continue hitting CtrlD for several more times, I get

so only the "individual words" are selected - foo_bar is not, nor is foobar. However, if I set word_separators to .\\()\"':,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$ (removing - and /) I get the same results when hitting CtrlD repeatedly:

- and / are still treated as word separators, even though I removed them from the list. If I add _ to the word_separators list, the results are the same, and only one obvious conclusion can be drawn: word_separators is ignored by CtrlD (find_under_expand).

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However, the word_separators list IS used when double-clicking to select a word. With the list like this: .\\()\"'_:,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$ (missing - and /, but with _), double-clicking on foo in each word in turn gives the following:

Interestingly, double-clicking on the very first foo gives

indicating that the "box" highlighting of similar selections is not paying attention to word_separators.

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When using Find -> Find... to search, word_separators is ignored. When nothing is selected and foo is entered into the search box (non-regex search), the following matches are highlighted:

This is the same regardless of whether -, /, and/or / are in word_separators or not.

If "Whole Word" is set in the options, the results are a bit different, but again they don't change regardless of whether -, /, and/or / are in word_separators:

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TL;DR

So, the conclusion is that word_separators is only in effect when double-clicking to select a word. Using a Find dialog or CtrlD (find_under_expand command) relies on some internal separator list, which apparently can't be altered (see my answer here).

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A little bit more

Some info I forgot to add earlier: word_separators is also used by some plugins for various sorts of things, such as creating/modifying/otherwise working with selections, doing programmable completions, find and replace, and other sorts of stuff.

Veloz

Do you think this is something that should be in sublime by default? (Having ctrl+d listen to the word_separators setting) Maybe I should mention this to the sublime guys as a feature suggestion? – Haigh

@StephenSarcsamKamenar - this has (kind of) already been addressed - see this issue in SublimeText/Issues. Although, this might be sufficiently different that a new issue could be created... – Veloz