word-char-exceptions

edit

Well... here's the thing... at least for me, Gnome Terminal already treats : as a word boundary character, by default. word-char-exceptions is set to nothing in all of my profiles, and if I cat /etc/passwd (hey, it's the first file I could think of that contains a lot of colons), then I can double-click on a username, UID, GID, or any other field to select only that field, bounded by the colon characters (unless it contains some other word-boundary, like whitespace).

It's only when I edited one of my profiles in dconf-editor to contain the key:

word-char-exceptions=@ms ':/@'

(as verified by dconf dump <path>) that Gnome Terminal started including those characters in double-click selections.

So, it seems like either the semantics of the word-char-exceptions key are reversed, or it acts as a 'toggle' that switches the default behavior on any character supplied to it. But, AFAICT, the only way to get Gnome Terminal to treat : as a non-word character is to do... nothing, and let it use its defaults.

ETA: Yeah, the semantics definitely seem reversed, because in my example above (with :/@ set as the word-char-exceptions characters, I still couldn't get Gnome Terminal to treat / as a boundary character, something it doesn't do by default. Setting it back to the default value of nothing was also ineffective. It was only when I set

dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/.../word-char-exceptions '@ms ""'