Re: [vile] searching for register contents

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 12:55:48PM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> On 28 June 2013 10:40, Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 03:47:57PM -0400, Wayne Cuddy wrote:
> >> If I yank a word (or words) into a register is there a way to search
> >> the current buffer for that registers contents?
> >
> > hmm.  That puts the content into the unnamed buffer as well as 
> > kill-buffer-1.
> > The $kill variable gets part of that (I recall as the first chunk, which
> > should be enough for word/words), so you could assign that to $search,
> > and use it - provided there are no metacharacters.
> 
> An option would be to permit a register prefix to ^X-/ search, in
> which case the search pattern would come from the register rather than
> the screen.  Lightly tested implementation appended.  Example use:
> 
>   "zy2e
> 
> to yank two words to register z, then
> 
>   "z^X/
> 
> to search for those two words.

But wouldn't that require adding a prefix for "all" commands?  That would
seem to introduce some ambiguities.  We might need a special flavor for
this, e.g.,

"screen-search-forward"         ^X-/

vs

"register-search-forward"       ^X-/

Copying between registers (Paul can remind us?) seems to be a weak point.
Also, for macros it might be helpful to add a function that filters a
string so that the regular expression matching metacharacters are escaped.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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