What happened to double clicking between two words on a Mac and highlighting them both?

I cannot duplicate this with any of my Macs. It's not a standard feature in any version of Mac OS.

I do believe that somewhere along the way, fifteen years ago, you installed some little utility that, probably among other things, included a kernel extension that altered the way the OS addressed this particular double-click. maybe a third-party mouse or trackpad driver. Who knows? And yes, these could have been transferred from one Mac and OS to another along the way depending on how you did your upgrades.

I did stumble on a very old thread on stack overflow that suggests this can be accomplished with javascript. That reinforces my belief that your OS received some minor revision at some point. Possibly from some little utility that you've long forgotten about. Fifteen years ago it wasn't uncommon to modify the OS in this way. There were, for example, mods to create color folders or add colors to the Finder sidebar or... all sorts of things.

If you're inclined to discover what kernel extensions might be affecting your Catalina Macs, consider running EtreCheck to scan your software for those and other software that have the potential to alter the operation.

Navigate to EtreCheck.com to download the utility. Be sure to Allow Full Disk Access when you install the app. Once you’ve run the app and created your report please post it with your reply to this message. 

Please note you must upload the full report. To see how, please click >  How to use Add Text when posting… EtreCheck Report.

Otherwise, just believe that the feature is not in the OS. Never has been.

Honestly, I've never heard of this being a feature of macOS, and I've been using Macs for about forty years.

Is this possibly a feature of a particular application that you've been using, e.g. Word or Office?

Like the previous posters, I have no recollection of this ever being a feature (and also 40 years of Mac use :-))

There is a way to quickly select two words, though: double-click and drag.

In fact, if you double-click on word, then you can select multiple words just by continuing to drag without releasing the mouse button.

I agree with those who've posted before me. I've been using Apple computers since 1980 and the Apple II Plus and have never seen that feature. As D.I. Johnson mention could it be a feature a particular software app that you're using? Or could it be a shortcut you created earlier?

I see that you do have the feature and I see that you are using a very old OS as well. But that isn't a feature of macOS. I suspect that you have installed some modifying app or utility that includes that feature and have forgotten about it. It may even be a custom mouse driver.

You say you just bought a new Mac with Sonoma 14.5 and that does not have the feature. What is the latest OS you've used that had the feature?

RecoilRob55 wrote:

I have another Mac that's running Catalina, functions just the same.

I'm not accidentally dragging the mouse over to the second word.

And it certainly is a lot easier than clicking on one word and dragging over to the second.

Then consider yourself unique, since you are the only Mac user to ever have such a feature.

RecoilRob55 wrote:

I have another Mac that's running Catalina, functions just the same.

I'm not accidentally dragging the mouse over to the second word.

And it certainly is a lot easier than clicking on one word and dragging over to the second.

Which mac, and which mouse?

Do a simple test: start that Catalina mac in Safe Mode, and see if you can still do the selection of two words in the same way. I fully expect that it will not work, which would be a clear sign that some third party software modification played a part.

I agree with D.I. Johnson that it might be enlightening to run EtreCheck on the newest Mac still capable of that behavior. I surmise whatever originally conveyed that ability (presumably, some kind of third party Javascript-based system modification) was progressively migrated from that old Snow Leopard iMac, until Sonoma spoiled the fun.

RecoilRob55 wrote:

... I've been using it for years on all programs.

This was a feature of older versions of Firefox (that which I'm running under Snow Leopard behaves the same way), but I can't duplicate it in the other apps I've tried.

DEFCON 3 wrote:

This was a feature of older versions of Firefox (that which I'm running under Snow Leopard behaves the same way), but I can't duplicate it in the other apps I've tried.

Actually I found out it was considered a bug in earlier versions of Firefox.

I have to agree with D.I. Johnson. I've also used Macs for nearly 40 years and am not aware of such a "feature". Of course it is possible to accidentally click and drag through two words.

FWIW, you can just click on the first word and drag to the second. No need to "double-click".

Among the five of us we're up to 200 years of Mac use.

Double-clicking between two words in Safari or the several other apps I tried results in selecting the space character between those two words.