How to change word selection separator characters in Mac OS X?

Question

Depending on your system, the word separator characters change the way you can select/delete a word (e.g. by double clicking on it or using a key combination with your keyboard).

The fact is that I hate the default behavior of OSX.

For example:

Take the following line of code:

obj.attr1.innerAttr

If my cursor is at the end of the line and I press alt+backspace, it will delete everything and not just innerAttr.

I only found some apps (like iTerm) which let you change the word selection separator characters.

Is there a way to change it for the whole system?

Answer 1

The only difference between the two English options (at least in for ASCII characters) seems to be whether period and colon are treated as part of words.

Part of words:

• '.:_ in Standard
• '_ in English (United States, Computer)

Not part of the start or end of words:

• $+<=>^` in Standard
• $+<=>^` in English (United States, Computer)

Answer 2

The answer by user ` is correct for pre-osx-10.9 (I think). However, in OS X 10.9 and later the System Preferences changed a bit. It now looks like this:

Answer 3

To the best of my knowledge, selection word separation is done on a per-application basis, not a system-wide basis. iTerm allows you to configure the characters, but that's an extremely unusual option; most applications use the predetermined defaults in the Cocoa and Carbon libraries, which are hard-coded, not drawn from a centralized preference setting.