Define a character as a word boundary
emacs, syntax
Solution
Another thought: Your requirement is very like what `subword-mode` provides for camelCase.
You can't customize subword-mode's behaviour -- the regexps are hard-coded -- but you could certainly copy that library and modify it for your purposes.
M-x `find-library` RET `subword` RET
That would presumably be a pretty robust solution.
Edit: updated from the comments, as suggested:
For the record, changing every instance of `[[:upper:]]` to `[\\\\[:upper:]]` in the functions `subword-forward-internal` and `subword-backward-internal` inside subword.el works great =) (as long as "\" is defined as "w" syntax).
Personally I would be more inclined to make a copy of the library than edit it directly, unless for the purpose of making the existing library a little more general-purpose, for which the simplest solution would seem to be to move those regexps into variables -- after which it would be trivial to have buffer-local modified versions for this kind of purpose.
Edit 2: As of Emacs 24.3 (currently a release candidate), subword-mode facilitates this with the new `subword-forward-regexp` and `subword-backward-regexp` variables (for simple modifications), and the `subword-forward-function` and `subword-backward-function` variables (for more complex modifications).
By making those regexp variables buffer-local in latex-mode with the desired values, you can just use subword-mode directly.
Problem
I've defined the `\` character to behave as a word constituent in latex-mode, and I'm pretty happy with the results. The only thing bothering me is that a sequence like `\alpha\beta` gets treated as a single word (which is the expected behavior, of course). Is there a way to make emacs interpret a specific character as a word "starter"? This way it would always be considered part of the word following it, but never part of the word preceding it. For clarity, here's an example: ``` \alpha\beta ^ ^ 1 2 ``` If the point is at `1` and I press `M-d`, the string "\alpha" should be killed. If the point is at `2` and I press `M-<backspace>`, the string "\beta" should be killed. How can I achieve this?