Re: Interpretation of a space in regexp isearch?

[Chong Yidong]

Juri Linkov <address@hidden> writes:

> A better approach is to have two separate user options
> for ordinary and regexp search whitespace like:
>
> (defcustom search-whitespace-regexp "\\s-+"
>   ...
>
> (defcustom re-search-whitespace-regexp search-whitespace-regexp
>   ...

I'm OK with having two options, but the trouble is finding the right
names: they need to have the right prefix.  I don't like
re-search-whitespace-regexp, because the name seems to indicate that it
affects re-search-forward the Lisp function, rather than the incremental
regexp search user-level feature.  (Note that search-whitespace-regexp
is similarly poorly named).

Maybe isearch-spaces-regexp and isearch-regexp-spaces-regexp, with
search-whitespace-regexp an obsolete alias for the latter?  Though
isearch-regexp-spaces-regexp sounds a bit weird.

> Also I'm concerned about `re-search-forward' being slower than
> `search-forward' for plain strings.

Someone mentioned that he had replaced C-s with isearch-forward-regexp
for a long time, without any ill effects.  Let's revisit the speed issue
iff it actually bites in practice.