Select word w/o copying it

[wasker]

That'd be great to be able to just select the word, without copying it.

[alefragnani]

Hi @wasker ,

Do you know the native Add Selection to Next Find Match command does exactly this?

Just hit Cmd + D (on Mac) / Ctrl + D (on Win/Linux) and it will select the word in the cursor position. BTW, if you hit the same command again and again, it will select the other occurrences of the same word.

Hope this helps

[wasker]

I would never know by the name of it... Thanks for pointing me there!

[alefragnani]

Me neither, but this keyboard shortcut was one of the first productivity features I’ve learned in VSCode, so I use it a lot 😁 .

[wasker]

I wonder if you'd reconsider reopening this issue. Ctrl-D is better than nothing, but it doesn't behave like Ctrl-Shift-W in Visual Studio 2019. :( It doesn't really select words, and it looks like behavior in general depends on the language in the editor. E.g., if I Ctrl-D on "workbench" in the file below, the whole string with double-quotes gets selected. And this behavior is a bit different in e.g. if PowerShell script is opened in the editor.

{ "key": "ctrl+shift+s",       "command": "workbench.action.files.saveAll" }

[wasker]

Also, sorry to bug you - it's just you're the person who already has extension for operations on words, and simple word selection seem to be logical to have there too. :)

[alefragnani]

No problem, you are not bugging me 😁 .

I'm not familiar with VS2019, so I don't know how it works. I made a search and found this documentation, which says different things about the commands. Maybe you used a different release or has some plugin installed.

Command	Shortcut
Edit.SelectCurrentWord	Ctrl + W
File.ViewInBrowser	Ctrl + Shift + W

Also, my extension has the same selection behaviour as Ctrl + D, while copying/cutting the example you provided, so it will not work for you either.

What you need, in fact, is a new Select Word algorithm (probably extracted from VS2019), which appears to recognise only letters, numbers and underscore as valid word characters. Maybe a few other symbols/combinations...

Hope this helps

[alefragnani]

It appears your request has also been made in VS Code itself. I think these issues can help a bit more, using the wordSeparator setting...

• editor.expandSelection does not respect editor.wordSeparators setting microsoft/vscode#87310
• Use editor.wordSeparators for Ctrl+D multicursor microsoft/vscode#15774

[wasker]

Thanks for the pointers!

I was referring to Edit.SelectCurrentWord behavior. It does look like VSCode needs to have separate functionality. I'll file an issue there.

[wasker]

Available for all in 1.44.