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+\K(?=\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="256" 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+\K(?=\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="768" 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

P.S. :

Here are ALL the positions | where the caret stops within the last change.log file :

Notepad++| v8.9.1| regression| fixes,| bug-fixes| &| new| improvements:|

 1.| Fix| EOL| duplication| regression| when| playing| back| old| recorded| macros.|
 2.| Remedy| search| failure| for| pasted| text| containing| trailing| invisible| EOL| character.|
 3.| Fix| customized| context| menu| regression| where| separator| (id="0")| escapes| FolderName| submenu.|
 4.| Fix| issue| where| a| single| undo| reverted| multiple| changes| after| macro| execution.|
 5.| Fix| visual| glitch| when| dragging| dockable| dialogs| on| a| 2nd| monitor.|
 6.| Fix| inconsistent| automatic| search| mode| switching| (RegEx| to| Extended)| in| Find| dialog.|
 7.| Fix| incorrect| URL| parsing| caused| by| Unicode| special| spaces.|
 8.| Update| to| Boost| 1.90.0.|
 9.| Improve| update| themes| feature:| fix| JavaScript.js| edge| case.|
10.| Update| javascript.js| to| better| match| javascript| (embedded)| in| all| themes.|
11.| Function| List:| enhance| for| Perl| &| PHP;| add| for| Nim.|
12.| Fix| comments| and| highlighting| in| TCL.|
13.| Update| perl| keywords| and| autocomplete| for| 5.42.|
14.| Improvement:| display| Find| dialog| status| message| with| invisible| characters| warning.|



Get| more| info| on|
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8.9.1/|


Included| plugins:|

 1.|  NppExport| v0.4|
 2.|  Converter| v4.7|
 3.|  Mime| Tool| v3.1|


Updater| (Installer| only):|

*| WinGUp| (for| Notepad++)| v5.3.9|

IMPORTANT :

You cannot go backward, with the Alt + < shortcut, if the caret is, presently, at the very beginning of any line , but you still can go forward, with the Alt + > shortcut, then go backward, again, if necessary !