I have what is probably a new user question, but I can't seem to find the answer. While editing a COBOL program, I'd like a "word" to include a dash (e.g. FLD-LEN should be one word, not 2). This is particularly for select word (Ctrl-J) or as the default for Find.

I've looked at all the configuration options, but can't seem to find a relevant option. Is there one and which is it?

TIA

No, the "Select Word" and the "Find dialog defaults to word under cursor" cannot be customized to include a dash as word character.

There is the Ctrl+Dbl Click feature which can be used to select a string depending on delimiters - see Configuration - Editor - Delimiters and its help page.

If you want something similar which you can execute with a hotkey, you need a macro saved into a macro file which is automatically loaded on startup of UltraEdit and has a hotkey. Hope following macro code does the job:

UnixReOff
Loop
IfColNumGt 1
IfCharIs "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_"
Key LEFT ARROW
Else
Key Ctrl+RIGHT ARROW
IfCharIs "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_"
ExitLoop
Else
Key Ctrl+RIGHT ARROW
EndIf
EndIf
Else
ExitLoop
EndIf
EndLoop
Find RegExp "[0-9a-z^-_]+"

Add UnixReOn or PerlReOn (v12+ of UE) at the end of the macro if you do not use UltraEdit style regular expressions by default - see search configuration. Macro command UnixReOff sets the regular expression option to UltraEdit style.

The character - respectively ^- in the regular expression search string can be replaced by $ (for selecting a PHP variable beginning with $) or any other character. Other characters can be also just added. The escape character ^ in the regular expression search string is only needed for the characters - [ ] ^ while all other characters can be put within the square brackets of the expression without the escape character ^.

See also Assign Ctrl+Double Click to keyboard.

Thanks Mofi. The macro works great. even better than ctrl+double-click. Example: AR03-I-OLD-ACTIVE-LST). ctrl+double-click selects the variable and the close-parenthesis, even though () are in the delimiters list in wordfile.txt for Cobol. The hotkey selects only the variable name, not the ")". I just need to assign it to a toolbar button, or to a click, something I can do with just the mouse. Thanks so much !!

The delimiters for Ctrl+Dbl Click can be configured at Advanced - Configuration - Editor - Delimiters. This feature uses by design (and that is good) not the word delimiters of the syntax highlighting.

You can't call a macro with mouse from a toolbar or menu. Fast executing a macro with the mouse is only possible with using an opened View - Views/Lists - Macro List view. Since UE v15.00 this view can be set as auto-hidding dockable view which would be the best for you using the mouse. But you can only add the command to toggle the macro list view to a toolbar to open/close the macro list view with the mouse and execute the macro with the mouse.

I couldn't get the delimiter setting to work with $ to be able to utilize ctrl+double click. Could you give me what my left and right delimiters should be to get that to work?

I tried a number of times after reading multiple times your post and Delimiters help page.

I used the macro and added in $ in the 3 character sets, and assigned that to a hotkey, which worked for me to select "$blah" for example.

Thanks

For left delimiters use " !"#%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^`{|}~" without the red formatted double quotes just used here to show you that the first character is a space character.

For right delimiters use " !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^`{|}~" again without the red formatted double quotes.

If the list of delimiter characters is compared with the list of characters displayed in View - Views/List - ASCII Table from space to tilde character, you will see that the left delimiters list contain all characters except dollar sign, digits, letters and underscore. And the right delimiters list is the same as left delimiters list with the exception of dollar sign also being added.

Well, both list of delimiter characters are too long as the maximum is 30 characters. You should remove those characters from both lists which are never left or right of a variable starting with a dollar sign. For example #:@^` could be removed from the lists to decrease the number of characters below limit of 30 delimiter characters in total.