Re: Questions about isearch

[Mathias Dahl]

> I agree with Per that this new feature is problematic. I have used Emacs
> for soon 20 years and up until now, if I search for an "a" I find only
> "a". From my view, suddenly finding "ä" or "å" as well would, in my
> view, be to find "false hits".

What about finding "ä" (a 2-character sequence) when looking for "ä", or
finding "å" (1 character) when looking for "å" (2 characters) -- would
you consider these false hits as well?

I have not thought about that scenario (in fact, I did not know there was 

a difference), but since it visually looks the same I would probably be surprised 

to not find the former when searching using the latter. It is a scenario that I 

would think is extremely unlikely to happen for "ä-users" like me though 

but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

> Surely one could argue that case folding has the same problem but I
> think those are less and it has been the default for as long as I
> have used Emacs and I think it is common in most programs to have
> this behavior by default. This new feature however I cannot remember
> seeing anywhere so it cannot be that important to have it turned on
> by default.

Emacs has many features on by default that are not anywhere else, or
weren't when Emacs introduced them.  So I don't think this argument
should guide our decisions.

I don't agree. Just because this is not common in other places does not mean 

we must use that as the sole argument for such a decision, but I definitely 

think it can *guide* us, together with other arguments.

Much better, of course, would be a poll among users. Since I came late to 

this discussion I don't know if such a poll was done. I have not heard about 

the use cases for this change either. In what scenarios is this useful, and does

those scenarios happen often enough to motivate such a feature being on by

default (and does it outnumber the cases where it causes problems)? I might 

possibly use this feature myself sometime, but it will not be the normal case. 

I view this a bit like the difference between a normal, and a regexp isearch, with

the difference that I would use this much less often than I use regexp isearch. Or

"word isearch", which I never use (possibly because I don't have much need for

it).