Re: Isearch in dired

[Chong Yidong]

"Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:

> It would be useful for isearch in a dired buffer to match only file
> names by default.  I think this would be a good feature -- if we can
> come up with a natural way to request ordinary search of the entire
> buffer.
>
> Can anyone think of one?

Although it's likely that the user wants to match the filename parts of
the Dired buffer, there are two things to note:

 (1) There is a significant probability that the user might want to
     match the non-file parts.  For instance, the user may want to find
     all files modified on a certain date.

 (2) For most files, the chances of a filename search string matching
     the non-file parts of the Dired buffer are very low.  Basically,
     this happens only for corner cases, e.g. if the user wants to find
     a file name "1".

Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to change the behavior of key
sequences like C-s from their defaults.

However, one possibility is to define a standard "dwim search" key
binding, and try to use that key binding everywhere we want a command
that tries to guess where the user wants to search.  Then we can make a
"dwim search" in Dired mean searching filenames.