Removed hyphen from word_separators, ctrl+d no longer makes sense
regex, sublimetext, sublimetext3
Solution
From what I can tell from some informal experimenting while answering your other question, the `"word_separators"` setting seems to primarily relevant when double-clicking to select words. For example, I have the following words in a file:
and my `word_separators` list is `./\\()\"'-:,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$`, so it includes `-` and `/` but not `_`. If I put my cursor in the first `foo` (without selecting the whole word first) and hit CtrlD, I get
and if I continue hitting CtrlD for several more times, I get
so only the "individual words" are selected - `foo_bar` is not, nor is `foobar`. However, if I set `word_separators` to `.\\()\"':,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$` (removing `-` and `/`) I get the same results when hitting CtrlD repeatedly:
`-` and `/` are still treated as word separators, even though I removed them from the list. If I add `_` to the `word_separators` list, the results are the same, and only one obvious conclusion can be drawn: `word_separators` is ignored by CtrlD (`find_under_expand`).
However, the `word_separators` list IS used when double-clicking to select a word. With the list like this: `.\\()\"'_:,;<>~!@#%^&*|+=[]{}`~?$` (missing `-` and `/`, but with `_`), double-clicking on `foo` in each word in turn gives the following:
Interestingly, double-clicking on the very first `foo` gives
indicating that the "box" highlighting of similar selections is not paying attention to `word_separators`.
When using `Find -> Find...` to search, `word_separators` is ignored. When nothing is selected and `foo` is entered into the search box (non-regex search), the following matches are highlighted:
This is the same regardless of whether `-`, `/`, and/or `/` are in `word_separators` or not.
If `"Whole Word"` is set in the options, the results are a bit different, but again they don't change regardless of whether `-`, `/`, and/or `/` are in `word_separators`:
TL;DR
So, the conclusion is that `word_separators` is only in effect when double-clicking to select a word. Using a `Find` dialog or CtrlD (`find_under_expand` command) relies on some internal separator list, which apparently can't be altered (see my answer here).
A little bit more
Some info I forgot to add earlier: `word_separators` is also used by some plugins for various sorts of things, such as creating/modifying/otherwise working with selections, doing programmable completions, find and replace, and other sorts of stuff.
Problem
I removed the `-` from the `word_separators` setting, and that works fine. But ctrl + d on the word `a` still matches the "a" in `a-b`, I don't want it to do that anymore. It's because ctrl + d wraps your search with regex boundaries `\b`, and `-` is still considered a boundary. Is there anything I can do to now make ctrl + d not consider `-` a boundary anymore. EDIT: picture: The "a" in `a-b` should not be highlighted, as `a-b` is a single variable name in this language, which is why I removed the `-` from `word_separators` More clarification: If I'm trying to replace all instance of the variable `a`, I don't want it matching against parts of other variables, like the "a" in `a-b`.