Re: lax matching is not a great default behavior

[David Kastrup]

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

> This has been discussed somewhat, but I don't think there was
> any actual proposal to change the behavior.  So here goes.
>
> Does it still make sense to make search and replacement
> use lax matching, i.e., fold stuff, by default?
>
> I don't think it does.  I think that users, especially
> new users, would be less confused if Emacs defaulted to
> literal searching - no whitespace, case, "character",
> or other folding by default.

For better or worse, our default fantasy "new user" is not one using a
computer for the first time but rather one using Emacs for the first
time.  Most other desktop applications with a search functionality do
case folding.

It makes sense in text modes, less so in programming modes, but there
are a number of programming languages which ignore case (partly because
they are older than useful encodings distinguishing upper- and lowercase
letters, and when ASCII terminals came around, people got tired of
writing and reading in all-caps).

-- 
David Kastrup