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From: bsa@telotech.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs
Subject: isearch eating initial ESC generated by cursor keys
Message-ID: <9105150902.AA18293@telotech.UUCP>
Date: 15 May 91 13:02:47 GMT
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In your message of 12 May 91 03:43:11 GMT, you write:
+---------------
| In article <1991Apr29.204040.14429@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> dave@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Dave Hayes) writes:
|    I have one HOWEVER I am reluctant to release it for general use until I
|    find out exactly how to stop an ESC from being eaten by a search command.
| 
| Here's the fix I use.  Apply the diff to the source or to your own private
| copy of isearch.el.
| 
| +		    ;; jbw: added support for unreading ESC if it might be
| +		    ;; part of a character sequence generated by a
| +		    ;; function key.  This is timing dependent and will
| +		    ;; not always work.
+---------------

There's a MUCH cleaner way:

(setq search-exit-char ?\r)

++Brandon