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Emacs Lisp Blog Post:

Emacs Lisp code: Easily Search for Text You've Selected
12/1/2015

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12/1/2015 - Emacs Lisp code: Easily Search for Text You've Selected (Emacs Lisp)

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Emacs Lisp code: Easily Search for Text You've Selected
Tuesday, December 1st, 2015
13:42:54 GMT

Emacs Lisp

(Updated at 9:27 AM EST.) I finally ran across a nice, slick way to be able to immediately search for the text I've selected in Emacs.

Most good text editors have something like that feature by default - but not Emacs, which was another maddening nuisance for me until today.

I found two solutions in this StackOverflow page. I prefer this solution, reproduced below.

I prefer the above because it even makes backward searching with C-r work right, not just forward searching with C-s, and acts normal when you search without selecting any text.


The original solution I tried only fixes forward searching, and erroneously selects blocks of text if you try to search without selecting any text. The second "search-selection" function from this StackOverflow post, reproduced below, along with the commands I added to my .emacs file to change the keychord C-s to make it use the "search-selection" function instead of "isearch-forward":

Prior to finding the above solutions in this StackOverflow post, the closest thing I had to a solution was the excellent highlight-symbol.el add-on.

Th highlight-symbol.el add-on is still very useful to me. The way I have it set up, I can press a single key - F4 - to search for whatever word (or function name, or whatever - even if it contains dashes and/or underscores) the point is resting inside. I can press Ctrl-F3 to easily replace that text. And I can press F3 to highlight that text throughout a buffer.

But, the highlight-symbol.el add-on doesn't provide a way to search for any arbitrary selected text, since that add-on doesn't require you to select text, nor pay any attention if you do select some text.

I'm still looking for a way to easily replace selected text, and will update this post if/when I find a way.

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Note by Apollia on Nov. 8, 2023: Please join my Patreon if you'd like to support me and my work!

My main personal website is now Apollia.org. I'm still not sure what to do with Astroblahhh.Com, so it's mostly staying as-is for now.