incremental search

incremental search

[Gary Wessle]

Hi
C-s turns on incremental search but it is not doing what I am
expecting which is;
when I want to find "man" it high finds "woman", how can I limit it to
the word "man", do I need to regex incremental search?

thanks

Re: incremental search

[Barry Margolin]

In article <m38xj5rmdd.fsf@localhost.localdomain>,
 Gary Wessle <phddas@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi
> C-s turns on incremental search but it is not doing what I am
> expecting which is;
> when I want to find "man" it high finds "woman", how can I limit it to
> the word "man", do I need to regex incremental search?

If you don't mind a non-interactive search, you can use M-x 
word-search-forward.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

Re: incremental search

[Malte Spiess]

Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> In article <m38xj5rmdd.fsf@localhost.localdomain>,
>  Gary Wessle <phddas@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>> C-s turns on incremental search but it is not doing what I am
>> expecting which is;
>> when I want to find "man" it high finds "woman", how can I limit it to
>> the word "man", do I need to regex incremental search?
>
> If you don't mind a non-interactive search, you can use M-x 
> word-search-forward.

You can also type C-s RET C-w for word-search. But this somehow only
finds one occurance.

It is always possible to redefine a key, but if you're just a beginner I
would probably rather recommand making a regexp-search with the
beginning and the end of the word.

I personally wouldn't want to have the behaviour you describe, maybe you
should think it over if it's really a fortune to have it generally (of
course sometimes it's helpful).

Malte

Re: incremental search

[Barry Margolin]

In article <87ods07tes.fsf@trick.ulm.malte.spiess>,
 Malte Spiess <i1tnews@arcor.de> wrote:

> Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> 
> > In article <m38xj5rmdd.fsf@localhost.localdomain>,
> >  Gary Wessle <phddas@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi
> >> C-s turns on incremental search but it is not doing what I am
> >> expecting which is;
> >> when I want to find "man" it high finds "woman", how can I limit it to
> >> the word "man", do I need to regex incremental search?
> >
> > If you don't mind a non-interactive search, you can use M-x 
> > word-search-forward.
> 
> You can also type C-s RET C-w for word-search. But this somehow only
> finds one occurance.

If you mean that you can't just type C-s to go to the next one, that's 
what I meant about it being a non-interactive search.

> 
> It is always possible to redefine a key, but if you're just a beginner I
> would probably rather recommand making a regexp-search with the
> beginning and the end of the word.
> 
> I personally wouldn't want to have the behaviour you describe, maybe you
> should think it over if it's really a fortune to have it generally (of
> course sometimes it's helpful).

It depends on what you're searching for.  I've often been in the same 
situation as the OP, where the word I want is frequently found as a 
substring of unrelated words, so there are lots of spurious matches.

I usually switch to regexp incremental search when this happens.

C-s \<man\>

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

Re: incremental search

[Stefan Monnier]

> I usually switch to regexp incremental search when this happens.

> C-s \<man\>

Interestingly enough, isearch.el does have support for word search (via the
isearch-word variable), but I don't see any command that makes it available
to the user.

The code below allows you to toggle this state with M-w while in isearch.

(defun isearch-toggle-word ()
  "Toggle word searching on or off."
  ;; The status stack is left unchanged.
  (interactive)
  (setq isearch-word (not isearch-word))
  (if isearch-word (setq isearch-regexp nil))
  (setq isearch-success t isearch-adjusted t)
  (isearch-update))

(define-key isearch-mode-map "\M-w" 'isearch-toggle-word)


-- Stefan

Re: incremental search

[Johan Bockgård]

Malte Spiess <i1tnews@arcor.de> writes:

> You can also type C-s RET C-w for word-search. But this somehow only
> finds one occurance.

Juri Linkov discovered "half-incremental word search". See

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-02/msg01119.html

-- 
Johan Bockgård

Re: incremental search

[Dieter Wilhelm]

Malte Spiess <i1tnews@arcor.de> writes:

> Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
>> In article <m38xj5rmdd.fsf@localhost.localdomain>,
>>  Gary Wessle <phddas@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>> C-s turns on incremental search but it is not doing what I am
>>> expecting which is;
>>> when I want to find "man" it high finds "woman", how can I limit it to
>>> the word "man", do I need to regex incremental search?
>>
>> If you don't mind a non-interactive search, you can use M-x 
>> word-search-forward.

This is really, really beautiful, thanks.

> You can also type C-s RET C-w for word-search. But this somehow only
> finds one occurance.

Yes, strange.  Fortunately with the key combo C-s M-e M-w WORD C-s the
i-search for words works in the expected repetitive way (the hint
comes from Johan Bockgård, see the link below in case you haven't read
his message).

  Juri Linkov discovered "half-incremental word search". See
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-02/msg01119.html

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany