UPDATE 22 June 2010 : Further to my even earlier bug report (FB-9398) FlashApe has posted a work around by changing a Snow Leopard system preference.
UPDATE 10-Dec-2009: I’m pretty convinced now that this is an editor bug, not a Mac OS X bug. Essentially the editors are using default OS behaviour which I think is tailored for natural language editing rather than programme-code editing. Original post follows…
I’m currently finding in some applications that “word1.word2.word3” is being treated as a single word as far as the Option-Left Arrow and Option-Right Arrow is concerned on my Mac. This keyboard shortcut should hop word by word. But currently hops from one end to the other. Not an issue for most users, but pretty serious for a programmer working with dot-notation syntax.
I first experienced this working with ActionScript in Adobe’s Flash Builder Beta 2 and logged a bug report, but further investigation reveals that some unrelated applications show the same behaviour. I have now logged a bug with Apple, but in the meantime I would be interested to know if others are experiencing the same? Or if you are running 10.6.1 and not seeing this issue? Please add a comment – I’m still trying to work out if it is something installed on my system. I don’t think it is basic user preferences as I am seeing the same in another user-account on this system.
Editors incorrectly treating “word1.word2.word3” as a single word re opt-left and opt-right:
- FlexBuilder 3 MXML and AS editors
- FlashBuilder 4 Beta2 MXML and AS editors
- Apple Mail
- Apple OS TextFields including:
- Spotlight
- Finder window find-file
- Safari: form-textfields & google search field
Editors showing correct opt-left opt-right behaviour:
- TextWrangler
- Adobe Flash CS4 IDE ActionScript Editor
- Adobe DreamWeaver CS4 editor
- Apple XCode editor
- Apple Finder – filename clicked and editable when renaming
- Firefox form-textfields and goodle search field