Microsoft Word - how to make double-click select everything between two whitespaces

Question

When I double-click a sequence of characters between two whitespaces - generally called "a word" - I would like for all the characters to be selected.

Double-clicking to the right of the underscore in _word will only highlight word while to the left will only highlight the underscore.

What settings do I change so a double-click will select everything between two whitespaces?

Answer 1

There are very BASIC rules in IT and how to work with text selection which have been implemented in the 80's and worked well for 30 years ...

• Single click: -> Location
• Double click: -> Select the full word [irrelevant of any ASCII characters,
  only a full separator [i.e. the point/dot should mark the end]].
• 3 clicks: -> Sentence
• 4 clicks: -> Paragraph
• 5 clicks: -> Page
• 6 clicks: -> Entire document

It seems that the newer generation of millennium developers who ignore these rules and implement 'what they like' so on each different platform the behavior is different.

How great ... Why don't we swap the gas and break pedal in a car in every country ...

From an anonymous user ...

Answer 2

Although this isn't directly what you ask for, there is a small gotcha while that might make your life slightly easier:

When you double-click to select a word you often enter a 'word selection mode', so when you shift-single-click the next word, you can get the entire _ delimited word with 1 extra shift-click.

The same seems to work for paragraph selection. A triple-click selects the first paragraph, then the next shift-click selects the next paragraph and everything in-between.

Answer 3

Changing that can be a bit tricky. I know that if you triple-click it will get the whole sentence or line between return characters. Doing a shift-doubleclick get the cursor point to the end of the line/sentence.

I hope the helps.

-Tango