Thank you for your comments Juri.  Do you have a thought on how to
implement this functionality as a package the way Stefan asked for?
Negative arguments in particular seem to be challenging. Right now I
implemented negative argument navigation by calling isearch-repeat with the
opposite functionality but that has all kinds of odd effects. For example
the search message changes,  C-- C-1 isearch-forward does not go back one
matched string but rather just switches to isearch-backward and so on.  I
did  implement visual hints for the negative arguments because that would
require changing the way lazy highlight works significantly (lazy-highlight
loop wraps around back to the first line and at that point you can't know
the negative argument for the current match).


On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 3:44 AM, Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote:

> > Please try it out.
>
> Thanks.  A few comments below:
>
> > +    ;; Bring universal-argument and friends back in
> > +    (define-key map "\C-u" 'universal-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C--") 'negative-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-0") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-1") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-2") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-3") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-4") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-5") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-6") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-7") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-8") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key map (kbd "C-9") 'digit-argument)
>
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "-") 'negative-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C--") 'negative-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-0") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-1") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-2") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-3") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-4") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-5") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-6") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-7") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-8") 'digit-argument)
> > +    (define-key meta-map (kbd "C-9") 'digit-argument))
>
> Instead of adding these keybindings, you can just set
> `isearch-allow-scroll' to t.
>
> Also there are plans to add a better variable `isearch-enable-prefix'
> in 24.2, you can see more information at this link -
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/143829
>
> > -(defun isearch-repeat-forward ()
> > +(defun isearch-repeat-forward (arg)
>
> > -(defun isearch-repeat-backward ()
> > +(defun isearch-repeat-backward (arg)
>
> Please use (&optional arg) for backward-compatibility.
>
> > +                             (setq hint (number-to-string count))
> > +                             (setq count (1+ count))
> > +                             (set-text-properties 0 (length hint)
> '(face lazy-highlight-hint) hint)
> > +                             (overlay-put ov 'before-string hint)))
>
> A suggestion by Tassilo to use superscripts looks good too,
> but then these hints look like references to footnotes :-)
>