How To Copy Words Without Trailing Space In Firefox and Thunderbird

You have multiple options to copy a single word in the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. You can move the mouse cursor to the word’s first letter, press and hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse to the end of the word to highlight it. You could also use the keyboard shortcut for this once you have placed the cursor at the beginning or the end of the word that you want to copy (by using Shift left-arrow or Shift right-arrow). Or, you could double-click the word to copy it directly (a triple-click highlights the full line up to the next carriage return). While doing that, you may notice that the trailing space behind the word is always highlighted as well.

If you are double-clicking words to highlight and copy them afterwards, you probably have a hard time understanding why the trailing space is included in the highlighting. I personally have no idea why it is the case, but that it seems to be the default when you double-click words in most applications under Windows.

 

 

It is easy enough to fix with the Shift-left key, but still a nuisance especially if you highlight and copy words regularly. The Mozilla developers have added a preference to the browser and the email client that changes the behavior so that only the word, and not the word plus the trailing space are highlighted.

Firefox

Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar. First time users need to confirm that they will be cautious before they see the preferences listing. Filter for the term layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word and double-click it to set it to false.

Thunderbird

Click on Tools > Options, and in the Options window on Advanced > General. Locate the Config Editor button in the menu and click on it. Filter for the exact same term and double-click it to set it to false.

Both changes are automatically enabled once you set the parameter to false. I suggest you try it by double-clicking on a word on a website or in an email. To reverse the changes, repeat the exact same steps. The preferences should be set to true once you are finished.

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