Re: char equivalence classes in search - why not symmetric?

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 3 Sep 2015, Drew Adams spake thusly:
> IMO and FWIW, it is misguided to provide confusing, dwim behavior
> by default.  Hard for a newbie to guess what the behavior really
> is, because it is too complex, conditional, contextual, whatever.

FWIW I just introduced Emacs to a newbie last month -- using trunk Emacs
because that's what I happened to have available. She was very happy
indeed about not only isearch, not only case-fold search but
specifically char-fold search, and she writes stuff using diacritics all
the time.

The key to remember here is that there are many use cases in which it is
better if isearch finds something similar to what you typed than if it
misses something you were looking for: you can always hit C-s again!
So thanks to case-fold and char-fold search she doesn't have to worry
about getting either the case or diacritics right, and can cut down on
chording and compose characters while searching.

So that's one newbie in particular who would vociferously disagree with
you.

> What should be done is to have simple, obvious default behavior,

She found "searching ignores accent-like things and case" to be easy and
instantly understandable, even though the implementation of ignoring
even case is (thanks to case-conversion tables) quite complicated in a
Unicode world.

-- 
NULL && (void)