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[Doug McNutt]

My favorite editor is MPW - the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop - which stopped working with the introduction of OS neXt.

In MPW, the command:

Set -e WordSet a-zA-Z_0-9

declares an environment variable which is a list of characters that define a word for editing operations like a double click. I can remove the _ character and execute another set command to change it. Actually I could also include a space character but I don't know how I might use it. I have set it to a-fA-F0-9 occasionally when working in hex and I have added the $ character for perl.

The Ubuntu Linux terminal app has a similar preference item called "select-by-word characters" and I'm pretty sure BBEdit has such a thing. I donno about vi and emacs but I'm betting they do. Ubuntu gedit doesn't but it's a formally requested improvement.

Googling for "select-by-word" produces some ideas.

But whatever you use in a command line environment or a scripting language like AppleScript.

mv This is a filename.jpg $HOME

is going to require special treatment like
 
mv This\ is\ a\ filename.jpg $HOME   or
mv 'This is a filename.jpg' $HOME

Keeping delimiters out of filenames makes a whole lot of things easier.


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