I wrote:
> Am I the only person who is being driven mad by the fact that after
> interactive search and replace you are put back to the last location at
> which a change was made rather than the location at which you type "n"?
>
> Typically that's a location at which I find there's a change I have to
> do "by hand". But VED throws me back to some unrelated location where it
> last made a change, and I then have to find the desired location myself,
> which can be time-consuming and error prone in a large file, even though
> VED was at it a moment earlier.
I have realised that I can get the effect I want by interrupting the
program (CTRL C) at the point where I used to type "n". It then leaves
the VED cursor at the point where it showed me the rejected replacement.
So the problem is not as bad as I claimed.
However, I cannot think of any reason why anyone would wish to go back
to some other location in that situation.
On a different point, I am also very irritated by the default for
backward search in V14.5 being to "wrap" around the file.
Typically the reason you search backward is that you want to find
something earlier in the file. I think the search should fail if there
isn't something earlier. Instead the latest version of VED wraps around
to the bottom of the file, so that you can end up finding something
which you think is earlier in the file but isn't. Previously forward
search wrapped and backward search did not. That default was carefully
chosen to suit what were thought to be most common requirements (after
observing people's use of an editor which wrapped both ways).
But perhaps it's wrong to claim that non-wrapping backward search is
preferred? Is the majority preference now for symmetry?
Of course, the fact that one can now override the defaults and also that
one can specify a search range, is an improvement: it's only the default
behaviour that I am complaining about, especially as the overriding
requires extra typing every time one does searches. (Thus the
backward re-search key sequence "ESC \" will wrap every time.)
Aaron
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