How to mark an entire word in the editor

[Claus Pedersen]

How can I use keyboard shortcuts to mark a word? I can manually press Shift and then right arrow until the entire word is marked, but this is not always possible in for instance a macro recording where the length of words can be different from each other.
Is there a keyboard shortcut to mark the entire word at the current cursor position?

BTW, can I make PLD to navigate via keyboard shortcuts to other code elements than words (paranthesis, assignments, etc.)?
E.g.: I have the code: thisVariable := thatVariable;

I can navigate to the beginning of the two words (this... and that...) but not to ":=" using Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right (default word left and right)
If I am using Ctrl+Del and Ctrl+BkSp (default delete next/previous word), I can delete a)semicolon, b)thatVariable, c)":=", and d) thisVariable in turn. Ctrl+Del can recognise a more detailed differentiation of the single elements than normal navigation. All I want to do is navigate to other coding elements than just words.

 

[Roeland]

I vote for this feature too. This will making macro's a lot easier!

 

[Killservice]

why you don't use ctrl+shift+arrow?
yes it dont work exactly how you need, but this is better than nothing or only shift+arrow ;-)

 

[Claus Pedersen]

Thanks for the responses.

The problem with ctrl- is that PLD does not recognise punctuation as 'words' but only 'real' words. E.g.:

my_variable  := your_variable;

Using Shift+Ctrl+right will mark 'my_variable := ' and this is too much. I only want mark on 'my_variable' and nothing else (if I should use it to copy text in a macro or similar)

 

[William Robertson]

Even without a "select next word" command (which I agree would be great for macros) I'd love to see a preference setting for the word boundary.

In Notepad or gVim, Control-Right moves to the next non-whitespace character. MS Word is similar but treats punctuation as a word boundary (like w in vim). I think most editors do something similar. But PL/SQL Developer's editor ignores all punctuation, so for example if you're navigating

where xyz in ('abc', 'def')

then Control-Right from 'in' will skip the brackets and quotes and take you to the start of abc, which is almost never what I want.

 

[Sailora]

I usually like to build a script to process SQL strings instead of Macro. You can use sailora plugins-mydefinde function to build script function, it will input the string selected in editor and out string processed into editor.

 

[patch]

Send me an email and I'll send you a trial version of a plugin I created for this issue.