Edit tools in message fields - Woo!

Hey, I just discovered that the message reply fields have standard keyboard "smart edit" commands:
Ctrl-Del deletes next word /partial word
Ctrl-Backspace deletes previous word /partial word
Ctrl-Arrow Key jumps cursor word by word
Ctrl-Shift-Arrow Key selects word by word

This is fabulously helpful for compulsive editors like me. I can't believe I didn't notice before. Big shout-out to the programming crew - thanks guys!

No kidding! I didn't realize that it was a thing. Thanks for bringing that to everyone's attention.

seriously, i discovered this in editing last year and it was basically the best thing about 2023! nice to see it here too.

Those are just features of your operating system. If you open a text file, they all do the same thing there. This isn't me taking away from their utility -- they're incredibly useful shortcuts.

We could always take credit for it though.  

I love keyboard shortcuts like these.  I've broken so many mice and monitors that it's essential to my sanity to know how to navigate a computer by keyboard alone.  

Christopher Weeks wrote:Those are just features of your operating system. If you open a text file, they all do the same thing there.

It's hit or miss. Any decent text editor or word processor will do smart edits like this.

But Windows Notepad, which I use a lot in my work for clean cut-and-paste operations, is painfully dumb in its editing capabilities. Some comment boards are equally clunky. So as a "power user" it's great to find them here.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:It's hit or miss. Any decent text editor or word processor will do smart edits like this.

But Windows Notepad, which I use a lot in my work for clean cut-and-paste operations, is painfully dumb in its editing capabilities. Some comment boards are equally clunky. So as a "power user" it's great to find them here.

Those four shortcuts are literally baked into Windows and have been since the dark ages (I started coding professionally on Win XP and that was how one did things then). Applications, including web apps can override that default behavior, but it has to be done actively. The ctrl+arrow navigation shortcuts have been around since the DOS 5 edit command replaced edlin. All of those things work in Notepad on my PCs today.

ETA: It looks like ctrl+delete doesn't work on the cmd-prompt but the others all do.

ETA2: I just played with my wife's Macbook and it doesn't use the ctrl key for that but has some similar stuff with the option key. Other than the macs, I don't have a Unix machine handy to play with.

Those shortcuts work on my Lubuntu unix machine.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Those four shortcuts are literally baked into Windows.

I don't doubt you, Christopher. I suspect Win Notepad was deliberately neutered and made annoying to use so people would be forced to buy something -- anything -- else. It could indeed be a more elegant tool, doing really clever things like recognizing a space as the end of a word. Certainly every free text editor in Linux does all these things seamlessly. So I smell shenanigans. But this is the only tool that positively strips away all other formatting crap, and I'm stuck with it inside the corporate ecosystem. I chafe at being stuck with clunky tools; it interrupts the work flow. But I guess the wasted time is billable.