* Something like this may do what you seek (which isn't clear to me):

Mx replace-regexp \boc.*\b \bco.*\b

** But why you'd do such a thing is a mystery to me--this may be more useful to you:

Query Replace

M-% string <RET> newstring <RET>

Replace some occurrences of string with newstring.

C-M-% regexp <RET> newstring <RET>

Replace some matches for regexp with newstring.

** Forgive me if you know this already.

*** But your question is slightly funny to long time Emacs users like myself because Emacs has been built, piece-by-piece, by thousands of programmers, to do the most complex editing jobs you can imagine and the regular expression library is the fastest in the world for "buffers", "windows" and visual incremental search and replace (as I describe above). By the way if you have to do search and replace, and you want to do it visually, I suggest "QEmacs"--made by the same genius who created Qemu (which is what VirtualBox is based on) and he also broke the record for calculating the digits of π. I'm talking about Fabrice Bellard--thank God for him!

(I recommend QEmacs--just for the fun of it--it has a few amazing abilities.)

* Finally, from reading your general [OT]/help me plea: I strongly suggest you use FlySpell-Mode (in addition to "abbrev" functions that the other Emacs hackers suggested).

On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe key-chord mode could help with this?

-k.

Please excuse brevity. Sent from pocket computer with tiny non-haptic feedback keyboard.

> On Mar 28, 2015, at 12:57, "Samuel W. Flint" <swflint@flintfam.org> wrote:
>
> There's something on endless parentheses that will let you generate a correction abbrev with a keystroke.
>
> Samuel W. Flint
> Please forgive any typos as this was composed on a screen keyboard.
>
>> On Mar 28, 2015, at 9:19 AM, Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I make a lot of typing errors (I have an injury to one hand, which impedes bilateral cooperation). In Libreoffice I am able to define wildcard autocorrect objects, e.g.:
>>
>> oc.* ---> co.*
>>
>> This will correct ocrrect, ocmputer, ocndition, etc. Does anyone know a way to do something similar in Emacs? Right now I am using abbrev mode and defining my errors one by one -- it is a very slow process since I make so many mistakes and have a moderately large vocabulary.
>>
>> I am sure this is possible somehow, I just don't know how.
>>
>> thanks as always,
>> m
>>
>>
>