Notepad Ctrl-Backspace behavior

  1. It's 0x7F "Delete" in ASCII and U+007F "Delete" in Unicode.

  2. It's in fact lack of an implementation. Plain Backspace sends an ASCII 0x08 (I'm not sure how the Edit control handles it internally), and it is not uncommon in various operating systems for CtrlBackspace to send the "Delete" sequence.

    The "delete word" behavior was added later, as an undocumented feature, and only to those Edit controls which use "SHAutoComplete". If a textbox has autocompletion disabled, CtrlBackspace will likely not work.

    (SomeMany programs implement their own text editing controls, which work slightly differently from the built-in one.)

  3. CtrlJ and CtrlM will get translated to a newline (^J is CR in ASCII and ^M is LF; however, the Edit control translates both keypresses to CR+LF.) Similarly, CtrlI inserts a Tab character.

    Ctrl_ and Ctrl^ will result in somewhat useless "Unit separator" (^_) and "Record separator" (^^).

    (The ^X notation means the Ctrl key – Ctrl-X in this example – in ASCII this is equivalent to unsetting the 7th bit of the following character.)

  4. No, but you can use CtrlShift← Left to select the previous word, and overwrite by typing.

    Or get a better Notepad.


Ctrl-Backspace to delete a word in Notepad has been finally been implemented!

See the changes to Notepad in Windows 10 version 1809. Here