Re: Questions about isearch

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

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>
> > 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".
>
> What about finding "ä" (a 2-character sequence) when looking for "ä", or
> finding "å" (1 character) when looking for "å" (2 characters) -- would
> you consider these false hits as well?
>

I have not thought about that scenario (in fact, I did not know there was
a difference), but since it visually looks the same I would probably be
surprised
to not find the former when searching using the latter. It is a scenario
that I
would think is extremely unlikely to happen for "ä-users" like me though
but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

> 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.
>
> Emacs has many features on by default that are not anywhere else, or
> weren't when Emacs introduced them.  So I don't think this argument
> should guide our decisions.
>

I don't agree. Just because this is not common in other places does not
mean
we must use that as the sole argument for such a decision, but I definitely
think it can *guide* us, together with other arguments.

Much better, of course, would be a poll among users. Since I came late to
this discussion I don't know if such a poll was done. I have not heard
about
the use cases for this change either. In what scenarios is this useful, and
does
those scenarios happen often enough to motivate such a feature being on by
default (and does it outnumber the cases where it causes problems)? I might
possibly use this feature myself sometime, but it will not be the normal
case.

I view this a bit like the difference between a normal, and a regexp
isearch, with
the difference that I would use this much less often than I use regexp
isearch. Or
"word isearch", which I never use (possibly because I don't have much need
for
it).

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