Re: Isearch: retrieve last successful search string from when you quit (`C-g')

[Christopher Monsanto <chris@monsan.to>]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> To be honest, I always thought there was some bug in isearch that made
>> it forget my search strings.  I'd love it if isearch just
>> unconditionally remembered my searches.
>
> It is not a bug; it is by design.  And a good design it is.
> AFAIK, no one has ever filed a bug report complaining that abandoned searches
> are not saved in the histories.

I rarely use isearch to find things that I don't already know exist. I
use occur or grep for that and use next-error/prev-error to navigate.
When I hit C-g, it means "I don't want to operate at the search
position, I was just looking for something and now I'm ready to go
back to where I was." Basically, a shortcut for accept the search and
pop mark.

> I doubt if you would really love it, in practice.  But it is simple for you to
> try it, to see. ...
> But for the last such successful-but-unused search string, yes, there should
> perhaps be a way to get it back.  That is what I proposed, not systematically
> adding unused searches to the history.

That's your speculation :) I'm just putting my two cents in for what
works best for my (perhaps eccentric, but that's none of your
business!) workflow. Since there is a difference in opinion, a user
configurable flag is what I would advocate for.