Re: new apropos feature in Emacs-22

[Alan Mackenzie]

On Sun, 6 Nov 2005, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> With the current code, ".emacs init file" will trigger a regexp
>> search, whereas a newbie user unfamiliar with regexps might have
>> expected the usual "at least two matches" behavior.

>A search engine quite frequently brings unexpected matches, based on its
>convoluted heuristics.  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with that phenomenon
>because you tend to use quoted phrases (which defeat those heuristics),
>but it's normal for majority of users I've seen.

I don't think this is an attribute that Emacs should emulate.  I have
frequently cursed the inability of search engines to accept regular
expressions as input.

Surely an Emacs user should be able to formulate a search criterion
without having to jump through hoops of dwimmyness, without the
uncertainty of not knowing how Emacs interprets his search string.  As
David Kastrup points out, these uncertainties come up in search strings
that will be used all the time, not occasional things that will occur
once in a blue moon.

Searching for a regular expression and searching for a match to any of a
list of keywords are distinct operations.  Surely they should have
distinct commands too.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)