I need some help understanding Emac's design. I use a lot of "word" constructs where I *think* I should be using symbol. For example, if I'm writing C code and I want to find foo but not foo_bar, I usually do \<foo\> but really it seems that I should be doing \_<foo\_> ... fine. I can make that adjustment. But when I do incremental search, I often hit ^w to pull in the next word but what I really want (often but not always) is to pull in the next symbol (into the search string). So if I'm sitting at this_that, I'd ilke to hit ^W (perhaps) and pull in this_that instead of just this.
So, I started looking at isearch-yank-word-or-char and I was going to concoct isearch-yank-symbol-or-char and got stuck-- at least briefly. Because not only is _ marked as symbol, -, +, /, *, etc are marked as symbol characters too. So now, I'm confused...
If I have: this this_that this-that
and search for \_<this\_> I hit the first and third this -- which is exactly what I want. But how is it doing that since this_that and this-that are the same as far as looking at the syntax table entries? They are both wwww_wwww.
I'd like to understand how the \_< and \_> constructs work so I can make my isearch-yank-symbol-or-char work in a consistent manner.
Thanks,
Perry