Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 7/7/2010 3:28 PM, Xah Lee wrote:

> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
> writing a emacs tutorial)

You are unnecessarily demoting yourself, Xah Lee.

The original Emacs didn't use RET to end an incremental search.  My neurons 
tell me that it was ESC.  Typing a RET in the middle of an isearch meant that 
you wanted to search for a newline character.  But the manual said that you 
could basically type any Emacs command to end the search.  Since the ESC keys 
moved further and further away from the reachable keyboard real estate, people 
used various alternatives.  C-g was the most common.

The use of RET to end an incremental search is a relatively new feature, 
introduced in Emacs 19.  The NEWS.19 file says:

"**** The character to terminate an incremental search is now RET.
This is for compatibility with the way most other arguments are read.

To search for a newline in an incremental search, type LFD (also known
as C-j)."

You are not expected to re-read the manual after every new release, but you are 
expected to read the NEWS file.  Since we recently had a 
several-hundred-messages-long debate on the virtues of reading the NEWS file, I 
will just refer you to it.

Sorry for foiling this opportunity for you to attack the Emacs manual one more 
time.

Cheers,
Uday