Arch Linux

discon

Member

Registered: 2010-06-28

Posts: 23

Text editor word breaking differences in Linux and Windows

One thing that has bothered me since I switched to Linux (and I don't think I'll ever get used to) is the behavior of the text editors, regarding word breaking. By "word breaking" I mean the way the editors determine where a word starts and ends and the way the cursor moves between them when you use Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow. The page at http://mjhutchinson.com/journal/2011/02 … d_breaking has a better explanation (MonoDevelop has developed it's own editor component and has a setting to change it).

Is there a way to configure it system-wide? Which component on the software stack is responsible for the word breaking behavior? Is it the GUI toolkit?

kachelaqa

Member

Registered: 2010-09-26

Posts: 216

Re: Text editor word breaking differences in Linux and Windows

the editor i use is based on the scintilla source code editing component.

it has support for defining which characters are 'word characters' and which are 'whitespace characters'. this allows for quite precise control of the various commands which operate on words (like ctrl+left/right). the character sets can be defined differently for each of the programming languages that are supported.

there are quite a few editors out there which are based on scintilla. i know for certain that SciTE has user configuration of word/whitespace character sets, and there are probably several others.

bernarcher

Forum Fellow

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-02-17

Posts: 2,281

Re: Text editor word breaking differences in Linux and Windows

There is no system-wide setting for word breaking in linux, afaik.

But in my preferred editor, vim, you can easily define (on a per-file basis if necessary) which character ranges vim uses to recognize word boundaries. See ":help iskeyword" in vim for detail.

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