Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Juri Linkov <juri@linkov.net> writes:

>> Possibly the languagues you use do not collide with naïve character
>> composition rules, or you ignore them or simply don't care about such
>> rules.
>
> Isearch shines in navigation.

My opinion is that Isearch is terrible for navigation. You may be
interested on ace-jump or avy, for jumping to a point that is visible,
or a plethora of terrific packages for jumping to a point that is not
visible.

[snip]

> It's much safer to have a default where you are not in danger to miss
> important things.

A search that matches unrelated text is broken. Full stop. It is
possible that, because whatever reason, the brokenness can be convenient
for you, but enabling a feature which is convenient for some users and
plain wrong for others is not reasonable.

> When a strict non-case-folding search skips a match,
> you don't know about this loss until you discover later the damage.
> With the case-folding search, you're visiting all possible matches,

ñ is not a match for n, as long as you follow the rules of the Spanish
language. That's the crux of the matter. It is the same as if an English
speaker searched "vow" and matched "wow".

> and when you think it finds too much, you can narrow the results
> by disabling this feature. This is why its counterpart case-fold-search
> is opt-out as well.

case-fold-search is in another category. character-folding *could* be ok
as a default if it were governed by the linguistic rules expected by the
user. That's not easy to implement, though, as it seems that there is
controversy on some languages. Spanish is very easy on that aspect.