Re: isearch-whole-buffer?

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

xyblor <fake@invalid.email> writes:
> There's also a more general design issue at play here: it seems to me
> that most of the time, when a person initiates a search, s/he wants to
> answer the question "where in this buffer will I find this string?" not
> "where will I find this string in the portion of the buffer that is
> below/above the point?". I find Firefox's "find" (control-f) to be more
> sensible in this regard, and I am surprised that in the long history of
> Emacs' development, nobody seems to have shared this view

I find the Emacs method far more natural than the search-whole-buffer
method -- it's extremely confusing if a search _can't_ fail because it
just automatically wraps.

In other words, the Emacs method gives you more easily usable
information about your search.  To find out if you've reached the last
occurance of a string in an "auto wrap" system, you've got to always
note the position of your last match, and manually compare to the
position after hitting search, which is quite annoying in practice.

The fact that Emacs basically _does_ give you the "whole buffer"
functionality with just one more repetition of the search key seems like
a pretty good way to satisfy both scenarios with a minimum of fuss.

-Miles

-- 
`...the Soviet Union was sliding in to an economic collapse so comprehensive
 that in the end its factories produced not goods but bads: finished products
 less valuable than the raw materials they were made from.'  [The Economist]