Is there a systemwide hotkey to highlight a single word in OS X?

Question

I've recently been wondering whether there is a systemwide hotkey for highlighting a single word in OS X. Having used Microsoft Windows before I got used to CTRL+W in Visual Studio and am now missing this functionality. Is there any way to make this work and if possible systemwide, e.g. on every NSTextField in any application?

Answer 1

You can create ~/Library/KeyBindings/ and save a property list like this as DefaultKeyBinding.dict:

{
    "^w" = selectWord:;
}

It doesn't work in Xcode or some other applications though.

See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html and http://lri.me/keybindings.html for more information.