RE: Occur should use the region as input if it's active

[Drew Adams]

> > in my experience most of the occur searches are
> > of these kind (searching for something I see) and it's less
> > often that I actualy need to type in the search term.
> 
> Yes and no.  The region can also be useful to delimit the
> search without narrowing.
> 
> FWIW, in my code, a user option decides this:

I should also have added, with reference to your point about
searching for something you see, that with this option turned
off the default input is the name of the (non-nil) symbol
nearest point.

That, plus the usefulness of using the region to delimit the
search, is the reason that searching for the region text by
default is turned off by default.

In addition, if you use Icicles then you can use `M-.' in the
minibuffer anytime to insert text near point from the buffer.
Repeating `M-.' gives you different "things" from the buffer
or it accumulates successive things of the same type from the
buffer.  So `M-.' gives you a way to pick up more than just
the nearest symbol from the buffer.

All of that confirms that I agree with you that most of the
time one wants to search for text (typically nearby) seen in
the buffer.