Re: killing the result of isearch

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I must be missing something big...
> I have an isearch that highlights a string, and I just want to delete
> that string.

> In other editors I'd just hit delete on that selection, but that won't
> work in Emacs...

It should be fairly easy to get what you want.
You could start with

    (defun sm-isearch-done ()
      ;; Activate the region corresponding to the found string.
      (unless (or isearch-mode-end-hook-quit ;; Leaving with C-g!
                  mark-active)               ;; Already selecting a region!
        (push-mark isearch-other-end nil t)
        (when (eq transient-mark-mode t)
          ;; Mark the selected region in the same way as is done by S-right,
          ;; so that subsequent navigation commands automatically deactivate
          ;; the region.
          (push 'only transient-mark-mode))))
    (add-hook 'isearch-mode-end-hook #'sm-isearch-done)

so you can do `C-s foo <delete>` and it will delete the found `foo`.
You can also do `C-s foo RET DEL` to get the same result.
And if you use `delete-selection-mode`, then `C-s foo RET b` will
replace `foo` with `b'.

Many Emacs users rely on isearch for navigation, in which case the above
could prove annoying.  Also, currently isearch pushes a mark at the
position where you started the search, so you can do

     C-s foo RET C-w

to delete the text between point and the first occurrence of `foo`.
The above will break such usage (as well as various others).

Maybe something like the above code could be added to isearch.el but
I think it'll have to be made conditional on a config var, so users
can elect to use this behavior or not (since old-timers used to the
details of the current behavior will probably want to keep using that).

Feel free to use this code snippet in a feature request (via M-x
report-emacs-bug).


        Stefan