Re: new apropos feature in Emacs-22

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   Whether newbies are accustomed to this remains to be proven, but the
   characters ``natural in the Emacs context'' above come from an
   experienced user.

.emacs and *scratch* are only for experienced users?

   > In the keyword searches that I am familiar with you can enclose the
   > keywords in quotation marks to force sequential in order occurrence.

   That's an advanced feature, you know.

Really?  I always use quotation marks in websearches and would not
know how to search without them.  For instance, Richard asked us for a
string that gave him all postings in the old thread we are talking
about and nothing else and I said:

"apropos commands and regexps" (_with_ the quotation marks included).

It works.  Exactly all 56 postings in the thread, nothing else,
`apropos commands' without quotation marks gives 124 hits, 56 correct
ones and 68 false ones.  With the at least two hits rule, specifying
additional keywords makes things worse.

   > I believe that after your change, newbies _still_ will have to learn
   > about regexps to accomplish what they are used to in search engines.

   Please explain why you think so.

Several reasons.

Because you may want to search for, say, the words "overwrite mode" in
that order, separated only by non-word constituents.  The fact that
"mode" occurs somewhere in a doc string and "overwrite" somewhere else
is usually completely irrelevant and produces many false hits.
Sequential occurrence is _much_ less likely to be an accident than two
distinct keywords matching miles away in unrelated contexts.  Just do:

M-x apropos-documentation RET overwrite mode RET

and then: `C-s overwrite' and you will notice that the vast majority
of the matches in the 919 lines long buffer have absolutely nothing to
do with overwrite mode.

_And_ because sometimes you might want to search for keywords
containing characters that happen to be special in regexps, say
.emacs, .mailrc, whatever.  Why are these only for experienced users?

Sincerely,

Luc.