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From: | xyblor |
Subject: | Re: isearch-whole-buffer? |
Date: | Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:48:13 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041206 Thunderbird/1.0 Mnenhy/0.7.2.0 |
B. T. Raven wrote:
I'm having trouble imagining why C-s xxxxxxxxxx... and then C-s again to force wrapping to the beginning of the buffer doesn't work for you. Even if the search string (xxxxxx...) is very long, you don't have to backspace to the beginning to return to the mark. You can just C-x C-x. No?
Being forced to wrap the search is inconvenient when you don't know how to spell what you are looking for, and you have to press C-s every time you want to try a different spelling. It's also inconvenient to start a search when the point is at the end of the buffer, because no matter what you're looking for, you'll have to press C-s again, and you don't know you've typed enough characters.
There's also a more general design issue at play here: it seems to me that most of the time, when a person initiates a search, s/he wants to answer the question "where in this buffer will I find this string?" not "where will I find this string in the portion of the buffer that is below/above the point?". I find Firefox's "find" (control-f) to be more sensible in this regard, and I am surprised that in the long history of Emacs' development, nobody seems to have shared this view; to such an extent that not only is there no built in function or variable to enable searching the whole buffer by default, there isn't even a convenient workaround. I realize it's a minor point, but given Emacs' extensible nature, I'm supposed to bend it to my will, right? Or am I just out to lunch on this?
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