Keyboard navigation across word-boundaries doesn't feel right

[kumarharsh]

Right now, the cursor in vscode jumps from the ending of one word to the ending of the next even when there are spaces and other characters between them.

Demo (with a pipe as my current cursor |, and repeated presses Ctrl+Right)

"|command": "actions.find"
"command|": "actions.find"
"command": "actions|.find"

Expected (sublimetext)

"|command": "actions.find"
"command|": "actions.find"
"command":| "actions.find"
"command": "actions|.find"

I think another related issue is that there is no setting in vscode (that I could find) of specifying the word separators (regex) such as in Sublime - or there should be a sub-word navigation option.

This was discussed here earlier: #3249

[alexdima]

@kumarharsh Thank you for the feedback. In the upcoming 10.10, the word navigation has been refurbished and these will be the new stops for Ctrl+Right for your example:

|"command": "actions.find"
"|command": "actions.find"
"command|": "actions.find"
"command":| "actions.find"
"command": "|actions.find"
"command": "actions|.find"
"command": "actions.|find"
"command": "actions.find|"
"command": "actions.find"|

There will also be a new setting editor.wordSeparators where you can customize what a word is.

[gordey4doronin]

What about camel case?

|"commandCamelCase": "actions.find"
"|commandCamelCase": "actions.find"
"command|CamelCase": "actions.find"
"commandCamel|Case": "actions.find"
"commandCamelCase|": "actions.find"

[kumarharsh]

@gordey4doronin that is subword navigation, which is being discussed in another issue.

[gordey4doronin]

@kumarharsh Yes, I saw the issue #541

However.. I'm curious why we call it subword?

If we have something like this command-with-few-words, then it works fine.
It sees there are 4 word separated with - symbol which is taken from "editor.wordSeparators": "~!@#$%^&*()-=+[{]}\\|;:'\",.<>/?".

And when we have commandWithFewWords, why it became subwords rather than words?
My expectation is vscode needs to understand that camel-case is also some kind of a word separator.

@alexandrudima What do you think?

[alexdima]

You are correct, they are very similar in nature.

But technically, one is called word navigation (as it involves separator characters between groups of characters that become a word, so command-with-few-words is a group of characters containing 4 words if - is defined as a separator) and one is called subword navigation (as it involves examining the contents of a word -- commandWithFewWords is a group of characters containing 1 word and 4 subwords).

They usually have different implementations and the latter involves some interesting questions about localization e.g. myÜberCoolWord, therefore making it non-trivial to implement correctly.

[kumarharsh]

@alexandrudima Oh... I was going to take a shot at it this weekend, but hadn't thought the case for localization at all. 😞