GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 100487
Request of UI change select-by-word
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The issue was originally filed against libzvt under bug 100155 where word-selection on gnome-terminal does not work when non-ASCII characters are given in text entry of "select-by-word characters". To fix, libZvt has code change to use PangoLogAttr, instead of using this settings, so that g-t's word selection should be consistent to how other gtk+ apps do. I think VTE should implement a similar way by using Pango to handle word selection, then the "select-by-word characters" UI option will be revisited.
The problem with using LogAttr is that an URL or a filename won't be considered a word, and those are the main reason people use select-by-word. And obviously of course you can't use LogAttr while still keeping any kind of preference for what defines a word. non-ascii should certainly be allowed in the "word chars", though of course that doesn't help for selecting natural-language words. We might need some hack like using LogAttr and then have a list of "chars that should not cause a word break" such as '/' and allow customizing that list.
VTE should be handling non-ASCII characters correctly in the word break configuration setting -- the UTF-8 word_chars string is converted to gunichars and ranges are evaluated using those values.
The current behavior seems to work, so marking FIXED (though works-for-me would be more correct). Please reopen if this needs revisiting.