Re: Isearch in dired

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

>> As for doing a filename search based on the current column, that is a
>> tad more reasonable, but still suffers from the "unexplained behavior"
>> problem.  There is simply no visual clue for the user that the "dwim
>> behavior" is taking place, or what rules govern it, so it will seem like
>> Emacs is behaving erratically.
>
> Fortunately, there is now a visual clue for the user in the Isearch prompt,

This tells the user that a special behavior of Isearch is occurring, but
not *why* it occurs (i.e., because point is in the filenames column),
nor how to disable it.

>> Note, also, that upon entering the Dired buffer, point is placed in
>> the filename column by default, so if the user attempts to search for
>> dates with C-s, the search fails by default!
>
> Searching for dates with C-s from the first file will miss the date of the
> first file because it is located before the filename.  So to search for
> dates is better to start from the beginning of the dired buffer or after
> moving point to the date of the first file where Isearch is not filename
> only (we could later implement dwim-search for the date column only!).

This argument banks on the user doing something to disable the special
behavior, so that he is not confused.  If the user happens not to move
point before doing C-s, the confusion occurs.

These problems can be circumvented by implementing a separate dwim
search keybinding (maybe something in the M-s prefix, such as M-s C-s).