One of my favorite features in Sublime Text is the Cmd+D keyboard shortcut that selects the word nearest to your text cursor. Multiple presses select other instances of the word allowing you to edit them simultaneously, but I mostly use it to select the word I just typed.¹ A similarly helpful feature has come to the iPad and iPhone 6S in iOS 9.²

Since most of my day is spent in Sublime Text, pressing Cmd+D quickly made its way into my muscle memory, and I started attempting to use it in other programs to no avail. A little bit of searching led me to the discovery that OS X has a similar feature built-in, but it’s not easily assigned to a hotkey.

You’ll need to create ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict and add the following lines to it, then restart any open applications you want to use the hotkey in:

{
  // ^ for Control, ~ for Option, $ for Shift, @ for Command
  "^w" = (selectWord:);
}

The example above uses Ctrl+W, but you can customize it to your liking. For instance, swapping ^w for @d would match Sublime Text’s key combination.³

Any application that uses native text fields will now allow you to quickly select the current word. Have fun editing!