Ctrl + Right Arrow behaviour - how do I change?

[Aelius]

It has irritated me for years that ctrl + right arrow puts the caret (the blinky insertion point) at the beginning of the next word rather than the end of the current word. This is irritating because it includes the spacebar character when selecting a whole word with ctrl+shift+right. It is especially irritating because it is inconsistent with ctrl + left arrow, which does not include the useless spacebar character.

Try it now, seriously. Open up a text document, click a random word, then ctrl + shift + left and you'll notice that it (correctly) doesn't include the useless space behind the word. Now try ctrl + shift + right and you'll see that now it has stupidly included the empty space in front of the word.

Does anyone know of a way (perhaps a registry entry?) that changes this ludicrous behaviour? Firefox has a config setting called layout.selection.caret_style which can fix it, but I can't figure out how to fix it in Windows itself. I searched the entire Windows registry for terms like "caret", "space", "insertion", and "insert", but I didn't come across any relevant registry entries. I also searched Google for 15-20 minutes in vain.

Whoever can help me fix this damnable infernal functionality will have my eternal gratitude.

 

[A Guy]

Welcome to Seven Forums Aelius. If you search Ctrl+ Right arrow behavior you will find countless complaints from various porgrams own forums, to Ubuntu, etc. It seems no one is happy with Ctrl+ either arrow, lol. You could remap the key, but would generally have to know the function that would result in the desired action. As far as I know, there is no key combo that has the desired effect you seek. You might post in the Autohotkey forum, and see if they have any ideas. If anyone knows, they probably would.

Remapping Keys and Buttons

AutoHotkey Community - share scripts and functions, get answers to your programming questions

A Guy

 

[Aelius]

Hi, thanks for the response, and thanks for the welcome!

Now that you mention it, I wonder if this would work: Could I bind a macro to the key combination ctrl + shift + right arrow which performs the following operations in order?

1) Press and hold ctrl
2) Press and hold shift
3) Press right arrow once
4) Release ctrl
5) Press left arrow once

In other words, whenever I press ctrl + shift + right arrow, a macro would override the functionality by adding a shift + left arrow to the end of the ordinary ctrl + shift + right arrow (i.e. deselecting the extra space that gets selected). I have a macro/hotkey program but I just never got around to setting it up

Although, I wonder if that would cause problems when selecting the last word in a document, since there wouldn't be an extra space.

Bah, I wish Microsoft gave clear documentation and customizability

I'll fool around with the macro/hotkey program and see what I can do. It seems that's my only hope! But it's not exactly a huge deal even if there's no way to change this.

Anyway, thanks again for the response, and I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one with this gripe

 

[A Guy]

You can certainly bind a macro to key combos, I am unsure how many you can string together. They have a lot of premade ones you can study, and their forum is active as well.

Scripts - AutoHotkey Community

Good luck, it's a great little program. A Guy