Re: When was a change installed?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I finally succeeded in running an Emacs from July 2014.  (Work was
required to make it run.)  I was flabbergasted to find that it DID do
the lax whitespace search.

Has the feature been active for 3 years and I never noticed until now?
It looks that way.

I tried various cases and learned something that might explain
why I didn't notice it.

It seems that the feature applies only to SPC.  Entering C-j matches
only newline.  That seems to explain why my searches for C-j C-j
always worked as intended.

Given that in lax matching SPC matches any sequence of whitespace,
there is no sense in a lax SPC preceded or followed by another
whitespace character.

Thus I propose that SPC adjacent to some other whitespace character
should match only a single space.  In particular C-j SPC should match
only newline space, and SPC SPC should match only space space.

What do people think of that?

Meanwhile, how about colorizing a space in the echo area when it is
being searched for laxly?  That should help users understand what is
happening.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.