Here's a handy tip for Linux users: I have just learned that Ctrl-Backspace can be used for 'delete word' in many apps.
At the bash command prompt, Ctrl-W deletes the word to the left of the cursor (maybe an emacs convention?). A number of other applications support this keystroke but recently I've found that OpenOffice and Mozilla both close the current window in response to Ctrl-W. I found in the OpenOffice docs that Ctrl-Backspace performs the desired function and lo it works in Mozilla too!
The alternative of using Shift-Ctrl-Left to highlight the word and then Delete, has the side effect of copying the highlighted word onto the clipboard. This is a particularly bad side-effect when the whole point of deleting the word is to replace it with the contents of the clipboard :-(
Exactly.At the bash command prompt, Ctrl-W deletes the word to the left of the cursor (maybe an emacs convention?).
readline(3) documents these under DEFAULT KEY BINDINGS. What I found interesting is that there are VI Mode bindings. I never knew about that while I was using Vim. I did notice that when I started using Emacs that my CLI navigation under bash became much more proficient.
Selecting a word clears the selection, not the clipboard. The two are independent. This is a mistake almost everyone using X11 makes – it took me a long time to understand it.
The confusion is probably created by middle-click pasting the clipboard contents in many apps (but not all) when there is no current selection, as well as some applications such as xterm offering no way to copy to the clipboard. So in practical use the line is quite blurry.