Re: isearch magic space

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

"Chong Yidong" <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:
> Some time ago, I proposed providing a magic space for ordinary isearch. 
> The response was generally favorable, but my papers were not in order, so
> the patch could not be applied.  My copyright assignment is settled now;
> can the patch be applied, or is it too late?

I like the idea of using a space to match any whitespace in plain
non-regexp isearch.  However, it should be nil by default to preserve
the default behavior for users who don't expect such a change.
Also there should be an easy way to put a literal space into the
search string.  In regexp isearch this can be done with C-q SPC.

One solution is to allow `search-whitespace-regexp' to be a list of
regexps and a new key could rotate this list and search will use
the first element.  I noticed that in most cases as the whitespace
regexp "\\W+" is more useful than "\\s-+".  So a new key could use
the default values '(nil "\\s-+" "\\W+") and switch between them.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/