Currently word boundaries in GtkTextView is implemented with the is_word_start and is_word_end PangoLogAttr attributes, i.e. only for natural-language words. Those attributes are useful to delimit words for the spell checking for example. But for word movements (Ctrl+Left, Ctrl+Right) or word selection (double click) it would be better to include also non-natural-language words, like a group of contiguous non-alphanumeric characters (punctuation, …).

In other words, have the same word boundaries as Vim. Ctrl+Left would be the same as 'b' and Ctrl+Right the same as 'e'.