bug#8183: isearch yanking

[gnu.emacs.bug@wongs.net]

Hello!

I just spent a while trying to track down a bug in isearch.el that
turned out to be a "feature".  C-y has been hijacked to do some weird
thing where it pastes the entire next line of the buffer instead of
the kill ring. (Wacky!)

Please change it so that C-y works normally.

While I'm sure there's someone in the world who has a use for
searching for the entire next line, there are many, many more people
who find it useful to search for items from the kill ring.

Additionally, the way isearch is remapping the C-y key breaks Emacs's
consistency.  One of the wonderful things about Emacs is that it is
not modal.  The basic keys always work the same regardless of what
"mode" you are in.

If you are not convinced, please consider that cut and paste is
fundamental to Emacs.  C-y is so basic to how Emacs functions that
it's been listed in the Emacs tutorial (C-h t) for a quarter century.
The keybindings mentioned in the tutorial shouldn't be altered
lightly.

And finally, think about what a pain it is to teach people new to
Emacs that C-y works as yank and M-y is yank-pop, EXCEPT when doing a
search where M-y is yank and there is no way to do a yank-pop.  This
one small quirk has added work not only on to people who are trying to
learn Emacs, but on to the people teaching Emacs and trying to write
easy to understand documentation and tutorials.

Fortunately, the fix for this is easy. In isearch.el, just change the
line that defines C-y as isearch-yank-line to isearch-yank-kill.

-    (define-key map    "\C-y" 'isearch-yank-line)
+    (define-key map    "\C-y" 'isearch-yank-kill)

Thank you,

--B. Wong