bug#24510: 25.1; Info: searching for ` does not find what looks like `

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

emacs -Q

C-h r g Dired
C-s `list

finds nothing, missing the occurrence of ‘list-directory’ that is in the
same node.

What looks exactly (AFAICT) like the backquote you typed at the prompt
is NOT the same as the character that precedes "list-directory" in the
buffer.  And it is not matched to that character by Isearch.  That
character is LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.

What you see is definitely NOT what you get.  And you wonder...

Emacs provides a default font where these two characters are visually
indistinguishable.  And then it distinguishes them by default when you
try to search.

This is extremely user-UNfriendly.  The default font for Emacs should be
changed.  Or else search should, by default, find the character used
when you type a backquote char.  Or else the character used, by default,
should be backquote, not LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.  Or some other
reasonable solution should be found, to remedy this annoyance.

The DEFAULT behavior of Emacs should not be so confusing,
user-unfriendly, cumbersome, and, well, unusable.

It is a common operation to search through our manuals for names that
are within "single-quote" delimiters.  In the past, these delimiters
were backquote and apostrophe: `...', and keys that insert those chars
are nearly ubiquitous on western keyboards.  Not so, the "single-quote"
delimiters used now.

Hard to believe this annoyance has gotten as far as it has (release
25.1).  Did no one try searching our manuals using Emacs -Q?


In GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (x86_64-w64-mingw32)
 of 2016-09-17 built on LAPHROAIG
Windowing system distributor 'Microsoft Corp.', version 6.1.7601
Configured using:
 'configure --without-dbus --without-compress-install CFLAGS=-static'