Re: killing the result of isearch

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

   Thank you Thomas for the reply.

     Ok, in a couple of posts it looked like the lack of possibility to
     just
     delete the thing highlighted was the main distraction. I also got
     the
     impression it is the subject of the thread.

   In a way, but because I thought I was seeing a region, which was not
   the case as I eventually understood.

     I don't want to upset anyone, and I didn't have that intention. My
     wording was maybe unnecessarily short.

   Don't worry. Things happen. Thank you for getting back to me.

     Anyway, I think I was reacting on the UI promise wording. I don't
     know
     there is such promise. There are expectations of course, based on
     peoples habits and prior experience. I agree that in most other
     applications, a highlighted region will get replaced by the next
     character you insert, or deleted if that is the action.

   I'm with you here. The problem here is that the result of search is
   *only* to move point and *not* to create a region of the highlighted
   matching string. So what appears on the screen carries actually very
   little meaning *because* with vanilla emacs, there is not isearch
   function (or any other search function for that matter) that creates a
   region out of that match. So it really is only a decoration. That's
   what I eventually understood, and that's why I wrote that it creates
   wrong UI expectations. If something should be highlighted, it should be
   the position of point, not how point found its way there, or at least
   the full region created by the search. Anything else has little meaning
   in the context of isearch.

     About the incremental search thing. I agree that it *could* be
     useful
     maybe to add an in-search command like
         Type C-l to toggle isearch-lock-string.
          The current search string is frozen and next
     self-insert-command
          or DEL will operate in the current buffer. C-l again from this
          state will revert to normal isearch. In this mode you can hit
     C-s
          again to get at the next mach.
     But then again, I don't know it would save so many key-strokes. If I
     want
     to search and delete, I find it rather fast anyway to just hit C-s
     again
     two times to get to the next match.

   You're right. Any solution that adds a layer between selecting the
   match and acting on it is not efficient. There should be a new function
   that acts directly on the match.
   Jean-Christophe Helary
   -----------------------------------------------
   @brandelune http://mac4translators.blogspot.com