Advance cursor past any sequence of non-blank characters and following blank, tab, or newlines

Russ Jones

Is there any way to advance the cursor to the next “word” where “word” means any non-blank characters delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines? The definition of “word” in NotePad treats every punctuation character as a word, which I find mostly unhelpful. For example,
142
is treated as a word but
-142
is treated as two words.
abc
is treated as one word but
“abc”
is treated as 3 words. This definition of a word when using CTRL-rightarrow to advance through the text is no doubt useful in some contexts, but often inhibits defining effective keyboard macros to advance through the blank-separated fields of a table, because where the cursor stops depends on the field contents.

I would like to be able to advance through the current sequence of nonblank characters and whatever whitespace follows, and land on the next non-blank character after that. Is this possible? Is there a keyboard shortcut that does that?

FreeMeow

@Russ-Jones found another post about the same subject that seem to have the answer
https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/24248/ctrl-l-r-arrow-keys-distance-modification

I tried what guy038 proposed and used the characters you gave: - and " ( how do you make the text have the nice red color people use when giving characters? ), and with your examples it does what you want.

guy038

Hello, @russ-jones, @freemeow and All,

I think, @russ-jones, that we can simulate these behaviors that you’re longing for, with macros !

Add in your active Shortcuts.xml, in the macros node, this section, below :

        <Macro name="End Previous NON-Blank chars" Ctrl="no" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="190">
            <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="(?=\s)" />
            <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1" sParam="" />
        </Macro>
        <Macro name="End Next NON-Blank chars" Ctrl="no" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="191">
            <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="(?=\s)" />
            <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="512" sParam="" />
            <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1" sParam="" />
        </Macro>

As, you’re probably an American or English person, I chose, on purpose, the shortcuts Alt + < and Alt + >, near the spacebar key, for these two macros !

They move the caret/cursor to the END of the Previous/Next NON-Blank characters. Unfortunately, you’ll always get the additional message ^ zero length match

I hope you’ll be happy with this solution !

Best Regards,

guy038