bug#27896: [External] : Re: bug#27896: 25.2; `C-M-%' with `rectangle-mark-mode'

[Juri Linkov]

> But we could somewhat easily change `C-M-%' to be slightly less
> surprising, and document its limitations.  That is, we say that no
> multi-line matches are impossible in rectangle mode, and we implement it

The current limitation is inability to use some greedy
regexps in rectangle mode.  This is not much worse than
limiting query-replace to non-multi-line matches only.

> by just narrowing to each successive line part, and executing the
> query-replace-regexp once per line.  (With some magic to handle `!' etc,
> I guess.)

Actually not narrowing in the sense of narrow-to-region,
but temporarily setting the LIMIT arg of 'replace-search'
to the end of the region of the current line.

I invite anyone who uses the rectangle mode to try
different use cases to see whether this works well.
Maybe this also helps in cases like described in bug#6362.