Re: Let's make C-M-w in isearch yank symbol, not delete character

[Daniel Colascione]

On 02/25/2018 12:55 PM, Juri Linkov wrote:
> > Right now, C-w in search-mode yanks a word from the buffer and globs it
> > onto the end of the search result. I usually want to search for symbols,
> > not words, so I end up pressing C-w multiple times. C-M-w would be the
> > natural keybinding for yanking a symbol instead of a word, but it's already
> > taken by isearch-del-char. How about moving isearch-del-char somewhere
> > else, like C-d, and making C-M-w yank a whole symbol?
>
> But isn't the prefix 'C-M-' usually reserved for keys that operate on
> whole expressions, not just symbols?

Good point. I don't have a strong objection to using forward-sexp 
instead of forward-symbol. It'll still DWIM in the cases I care about.

> Fortunately, it's easy to add support for yanking an expression:
> in addition to the existing option 'edit' of 'search-exit-option'
> we can also provide a new option 'move' that will sync the current
> search string with the new position in the buffer after moving point
> using all standard motion commands, e.g. `C-f' will add the next char
> to the end of the search string, `C-M-f' will add the next expression,
> `M-f' will add the next word, `C-b' will delete text from the end of
> the search string, etc.  Here is the implementation:

Thanks. I'm looking for ways we can tweak the existing default 
interaction model, but I think we should take a broader look at how 
isearch works in the first place. IMHO, find-and-replace should be more 
closely integrated into isearch, we should have a unified history for 
regular and regex search, and case-sensitivity, symbol-granularity, 
regex mode, etc. should all be independently toggleable peer flags.