Weekly Emacs tip #21 — Emacs Redux writes: You have no idea how powerful isearch is!

A few weeks ago, Bozhidar Batsov, writer of the Emacs Redux blog wrote a post on isearch, the function you use to search text in the current buffer, and how there is a lot more to it than just typing C-s to search for some text.

I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r (isearch-backward) a lot. If fact, I think I do most of my “regular” text searches with them. The basic idea is: hit C-s or its counterpart, start typing your search string and Emacs will jump to the next (or previous) occurrence of that string. A subsequent press of C-s will bring you to the next occurrence, and so forth. Remember that switching the search direction while searching (keeping the same search string) is fine: just alternate between C-s and C-r.

Most of the time, after I found the occurrence I was looking for, I hit Enter to end the search and that’s it. What I also knew is that you can use C-y to yank (paste) killed text as the search string and a subsequent M-y to cycle through previous kills. Similarly, you can use M-p (a mnemonic for “previous”) and M-n (for “next”) to go back and forth in the list of previously used search terms¹.

However, as Batsov explains, there are a whole bunch of extra commands you can call while searching with isearch. I won’t reiterate them here, except for

• M-s r to toggle regular expression mode. This is a useful one as I usually would abort the isearch (with C-g) and restart isearch-forward-regexp (C-M-s) or its backward cousin when I decide I needed to do a regexp search.
• M-s M-i to search for the thing (word) at point.

So go and read Batsov’s post, even if you won’t remember all of it! Just write a few shortcuts down and practice those.