Re: Search occurrences of character at point

[john@ankarstrom.se (John Ankarström)]

Hello!

Guido Van Hoecke <guivho@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd like a way to have the cursor sit on such a character and hit a key
> to position it at the next occurrence of said character.

Tinkering around in the *scratch* buffer, I came up with the
following function:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun my/next-char-at-point ()
  (interactive)
  (set-mark (point))
  (deactivate-mark)
  (search-forward (format "%c" (char-after)) nil nil 2)
  (forward-char -1))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

It works as you'd expect. Call it and it will bring you to the
next occurrence of the character at point. Conveniently, it will
also leave a mark at the old character.

This means that if you bind it to, say, `C-c n', you could hit
`C-c n' to go through all future occurrences of the char at
point, and then repeatedly use `C-u <space>' to pop the mark and
cycle back through the occurrences.

Pretty nifty, no?

- John