Re: Questions about isearch

[Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 5:50 PM, Per Starbäck <per.starback@gmail.com>
wrote:

One answer I got was that it's possible to turn this off. Yes, it is,
> but defaults are important for what impression you give. I haven't
> been active on the list for some time, but when I have expressed
> opinions on Emacs here before it has often been not thinking about
> myself, but thinking about the students that I teach Emacs, so that
> *I* can change settings is not enough for my consideration.
>
> Also character folding is a great feature! I don't want to turn it
> off! It's just that it's bad to fold characters that are in no way
> seen as variants but totally different letters.
>

I agree with Per that this new feature is problematic. I have used Emacs
for soon 20 years and up until now, if I search for an "a" I find only
"a". From my view, suddenly finding "ä" or "å" as well would, in my
view, be to find "false hits". Surely one could argue that case folding
has the same problem but I think those are less and it has been the
default for as long as I have used Emacs and I think it is common in
most programs to have this behavior by default. This new feature however
I cannot remember seeing anywhere so it cannot be that important to have
it turned on by default.

I am sure the new feature is useful to some, but for me it will just be
annoying. I have "ä" and "å" keys on my keyboard so I have no problem
inputting them. When I visit other countries where people does not have
such keyboards I simply turn on the Swedish input method swedish-postfix
to enter these letters.

I think having this feature on by default might risk annoy more users
than it will benefit. I'm quite certain, if I tried to get a Swedish
college to try out Emacs, that they would comment on such a feature as
being quite strange. I do not agree it would be the same as finding a "u"
when searching for "v", but still...

Now that I know about this feature I will turn it off and enable it only
when I need it, but I wish it would have been the other way around, that
users which needs it would need to enable it.

Sorry for coming late to the party on this one...

/Mathias

PS. Per mentioned that the scenario with "ide" matching "idé" would be
okay. I'm divided on that one. "é" is not an official part of the
Swedish alhpabet, like "å" and "ä", so from some perspective it would be
okay, but it feels like a very slippery slope... Probably, as some has
advocated here, if there would be a way to express the language for a
buffer or region of text a feature like this *might* fit better.

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