If you want an apple, as for an apple. If you want a pear, ask for a pear. What you do is you want a pear, yet you ask for an apple and expect to receive the kind of apple that tastes as close to pear as possible. And even though you can configure the kind of the apple you'll receive, it's still not good enough for you, you wish that Ubuntu by default configures to deliver your favorite kind of apple, the one that tastes the closest to pears. You keep ignoring that you could actually ask for a pear if that's what you want, or that the default kind of apple was decided by those who actually want an apple apple, not a pear-ish apple.

(In case it's not clear: apple = select a word; kind of apple = the configured characters that should be considered part of a word; pear = select a URL.)

> > Double clicking, by design, is _not_ meant to select URLs.

> Really? Which design is that?

I've checked the behavior of the following apps for you: Terminal emulators: Linux console + gpm, xterm, urxvt, konsole, st, pterm, terminology, mlterm; browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and in each of them a non-hyperlinked URL as part of a rendered page, a simple textarea, as well as Gmail's compose window; other apps: LibreOffice Writer (hyperlink removed), gedit.

Guess what: Out of these urxvt is the only one that selects URLs on double click. Plus xterm and konsole are the ones that work as gnome-terminal used to work (including the bugs you're aware of: due to only looking at the characters individually, quite often they don't correctly recognize URLs because they simply don't care about URLs when you double click). All the other apps select a shorter segment of the URL.

So you ask what design it is... well, it is the design of most of the apps out there.

You're perfectly aware that what gnome-terminal used to do was far from perfect, it made mistakes many times. Example: Let's take a URL with a trailing dot, such as this sentence: "For details see http://example.com/whatever.html." Hover underlining does exclude the trailing dot, and similarly the right-click menu's Open/Copy Link actions exclude it too. It was never possible to do the same with double clicking. Either the dot character is included in the set of word characters, in which case the trailing dot is included, or it is excluded from the set, in which case double clicking also stops the selection at the middle of the domain name, or before the extension.

Apart from urxvt, I don't think any terminal emulators implement a more sophisticated algorithm for double clicking, and with their current approach (looking at characters individually) it is just not possible to make it right.

gnome-terminal/vte has never implemented anything more sophisticated either, and has no such bug entry and I can't recall any TODO about it either. If it was ever agreed that double clicking should recognize and highlight URLs, I'm absolutely certain there would be a bug entry about it, or it would already be implemented. This is a clear proof that double clicking was never meant to select URLs. This is not my personal opinion, this is a fact. Double clicking is meant to aid conveniently select logical parts of any regular text (not URLs), such as the output of a grep, gcc, whatever command.

> And regardless of whether or not double click is meant to select URLs,
> it's a literal fact that it did in fact (largely) select URLs for many
> years.

The key is "largely" here.

In previous gnome-terminal versions double clicking on a URL selected it properly with a perhaps (wild guess) let's say 90% accuracy. Is this a reasonable guess? (The trailing dot discrepancy mentioned above is just one of the many cases where double clicking's plain stupid algorithm gave different result than the complex URL regex.)

Myself being a software engineer (actually a recent active contributor to gnome-terminal/vte), you're never going to get my buy-in for something that works 90% of the time. Never. I'm not going to approve something that "largely" works. I might approve something that "always" works, or with an as small error rate as inevitable.

Adding back ":" to wordchars is the "workaround" of the best gain:investment ratio that you could do now on your computer (1 minute investment, gain is that it works ~90% of the cases for you), but is definitely not a solution suitable for mainstream.

And let's not forget that while adding ":" would sorta-kinda but not fully solve your problem, it would break the workflow of many other people (who actually use double click for what it was designed for).

I cannot understand why you ask for making it work about 90% of the time, for bringing back that broken implementation, and I really don't feel like continuing the discussion in this direction.

What I would understand (I probably still wouldn't agree with you, but it would make sense to have a nice discussion) is if you asked for URLs to be highlighted on double-click exactly as they are already recognized as URLs right now when underlined on hover, or accessed via the right-click menu (e.g., with the above example, excluding the trailing dot). This could be achieved by some coding (as done in urxvt), but not by fiddling with wordchars.

> That's your opinion; in my opinion this is a regression in Ubuntu.

Anything that's not an obvious bugfix is always controversial, there are always people who dislike any such change. This on its own is not a reason to revert such changes. In this case something that (i) was never intended to work, and (ii) never actually worked reliably, that is, obviously it was a mere coincidence that it often worked, no longer works in the default config. Whereas, in turn, for some other folks something else (something that was a design goal, e.g. selecting the filename from grep's output, or tons of similar ones) is much more convenient now.