Re: Apropos commands and regexps

[Kim F. Storm]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> > Are you suggesting all apropos commands should work by keywords
> > instead of by regexps?
> 
> The way I envisioned it was all apropos commands taking _list_ of
> regexps (separated by whitespace/commas), and applying them in an `and'
> manner.  That way, the case where each element is a simple word word
> would act like a typical keyword search, and the case where there's
> only one entry would act like the current single-regexp implementation.

I don't like the "and" approach -- at least not as the default.
(see my previous posting for the rationale).

> 
> Given the particular nature of apropos usage in emacs, I think there
> wouldn't be any conflict in practice from using whitespace/commas as
> the list delimiters.

Comparing to WEB search engines, I don't think that separating
keywords with commas is common practice...

> 
> There might also be other things we can do, like if a term begins with
> an alphabetic character, anchor it with \<.  [anchoring the end is
> probably not a good idea, because people often expect searches to match
> prefixes, I think.]

Consider searching for "grep" -- shouldn't that return "igrep" ?

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk