Subject: Re: bug#13480: 24.3.50; `C-w' from Isearch should translate newlines to spaces

From: Dani Moncayo <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:05:19 +0100

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Juri Linkov <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Wait a moment.  On second thought, I think that no translation should
>> be necessary at all when adding text from somewhere to the search string.
>
> Why not?  If you save "foo<newline>bar" to the kill-ring and
> yank it to the search string with `C-y' (`isearch-yank-kill')
> wouldn't you want it to translate the <newline> into a space?

No, I wouldn't.  I don't like that translation for two reasons:

1. It loses information that may be useful.  In the future we could
want to implement a feature whereby the user can toggle the
lax-whitespace-matching behavior during an Isearch session.  In fact I
think it would be a good feature (and ISTR that Drew proposed some
time ago).  That feature would not be possible if we change the text
that the user supplies to search for.

2. It is less surprising and more clean to me to see in the echo area
exactly the text I'm supplying, without translations of any kind.

-- 
Dani Moncayo