1431672 - Provide a preference to determine whether underscore is treated as a letter during word selection

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Selection, enhancement)

Description

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

We recently changed this behavior in bug 196175 to make double-click selection and arrow-key cursor movement treat multi_word_identifiers as single units.

However, some users (quite reasonably) preferred the old behavior; see bug 196175 comment 52 and following. While I don't want to add overhead or complexity to the code, I think a simple boolean preference "layout.word_select.stop_at_underscore" can be added without significant cost/complexity, and we should do this to allow users the choice.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Add a pref to control whether underscore is treated as a word-forming character

I'm sympathetic to the users requesting a pref to control this, so I think we should add a simple boolean pref here. To minimize the runtime impact, the patch caches the pref in a static variable, so users will need to restart the browser to see the effect of changing it, but I think that's OK; it doesn't really need to be "live".

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/a4ac245899c5
Add a pref to control whether underscore is treated as a word-forming character. r=m_kato

Comment 3

[Raul Gurzau (:RaulG)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a4ac245899c5