GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 750577
highlighting on left mouse double click ends at colon (:)
Last modified: 2015-06-23 13:14:28 UTC
I opened this downstream in ubuntu as bug 1463072 (http://pad.lv/1463072). I'm not perfectly sure when this regression occurred. I know that 3.14.2-0ubuntu4 did not have the issue, and that 3.16.2-1ubuntu1 does. Its terribly annoying when copy and pasting links. When i double click on url text in gnome-terminal (http://example.com/path) its selection stops at the ':'. This means i keep pasting people urls that look like /paste.ubuntu.com/11591324/ rather than http://paste.ubuntu.com/11591324/ . Note, mouse over the url *does* underline the whole url.
See bug 727743 (esp. comments 16) & bug 730632 (esp. comments 33 & 37). URL detection (underlining on mouseover, context menu, ctrl+click) has nothing to do with the word boundary (double click) behavior, these are two unrelated parts of the code. The colon character is not part of the default set of wordchars, see those discussions for rationale. It's unfortunate for URLs, but adds much more to usability elsewhere. And you can configure it for yourself.
I wondered about that too, as it feels like a regression. > you can configure it for yourself. That seems to be https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730632#c33 for the record.