[usea]

This won't work in everything, will it? What about if your cursor is at the beginning of a word? Not to mention that different editors stop in different places with ctrl+arrows. Many editors have a key combo for select word already. In Visual Studio it's ctrl-w.

[stolksdorf]

I've been using it for about 1.5 years, and it's been mostly consistent between applications; Notepad being the only one I've noticed with odd characters it includes in the ctrl+arrow movements. I really like the approach using Autohotkey because it becomes universal on my system, so capslock can select words in chrome, IM apps, etc. I don't have to worry that the app supports that feature.