Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!gatech!psuvax1!psuvm!barilvm!bimacs!sprecher
From: sprecher@bimacs.BITNET (Sprecher  yossy)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: This is Bad (isearch-forward & query-replace)
Message-ID: <1042@bimacs.BITNET>
Date: 13 Aug 89 13:17:51 GMT
Organization: Math & CS, BarIlan U, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Lines: 38



The most annoying thing about emacs is that when you use incremental search
to find some string you must end it with an Escape. If you instead use an
arrow to move around the screen it generates junk (the reason is that the
arrow keys are implemented as a character sequence starting with an Escape,
e.g. ESC O C. Therefore, when you press an arrow emacs uses the ESC to end
the search and plugs in the OC charcters in the file, as if they were keyed
in from the key-board). This is really annoying. It happens so many times
that it's not funny.

Why can't emacs be like any other good editor where once you found the text,
you can move around without any preliminary steps, such as pressing ESC?

query-replace is even worse: once you get out of it with an ESC it is
impossible to resume.

Why doesn't emacs have any plain vanilla search and search-replace where you
can pause and then resume as in SPF (pardon the heresy).

Is there a way to replace the ESC with some other control-character as the
stop character for the search?

Am I missing some thing?

I found a partial answer for the search by adding the following:

(global-set-key "\C-f" "\C-s\C-s")

The first time I search for a string I still need to use the regular
incremental search (cntl-s), but on all subsequent occurances I can
use  cntl-f  which will find the next occurance without expecting an
ESC to end it, so that I can use the arrows freely. To wrap around to
the beginning of the file I still need cntl-s.

Any better suggestions?

Yossi Sprecher


p.s. I'm using emacs verion 18.45