Subject: Re: bug#25562: 25.1; isearch-forward-word first matches a non-word

From: Antoine Levitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 09:12:20 +0100

30 January 2017 01:30 +0100, Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>:
>> I see, thanks for the explanation. That's still unsatisfactory to me. I
>> think an ideal incremental word search would just start over from the
>> current point each time a new character is typed (that's what most users
>> would expect). Then any non-insertion command would make the user "commit"
>> to the particular search and the incremental search proper would begin. Is
>> that compatible with the current design of isearch?
>
> What you describe looks like isearch-barrier used for subsequent \| in regexps,
> e.g. typing ‘C-M-s ^\<it\>’ and then ‘\|’ moves point back to the beginning
> of the search.  But wouldn't this make the search too “jumpy”, especially
> while typing long words?

My use case of isearch-word is mainly short words, e.g. variable names
such as f in f(x) in latex. I'd guess that's a pretty common pattern.
Even for long words, I think an user would type a word quickly, and be
confused that their first match is not really a match. That offsets the
potential jumpiness (ie what happens when the user is typing the word)
for me.