isearch-light

An Isearch replacement for Emacs.

Features

• Provide multi matching, a real minibuffer, no unexpected quit or errors and comprehensive mode-line indicators.
• Old position is always saved in mark-ring when exiting to a new place.
• Only one command isl-search for all which cycle in all matches without stopping.
• Select nearest match from your position, not necessarily after or before, this initial match can be reached back at any moment.
• Allow jumping to Iedit at any time during the search.
• Allow jumping to helm-occur at any time.
• Allow showing only the matching lines with their context.
• Help available at any time during search without having to quit session.
• Allow resuming previous session in each buffer isl had visited.

It aims to keep simple with only the needed features, no extra features you will never use.

Dependencies

No mandatory dependencies, but for a better experience install Helm to have helm-occur and Iedit to allow jumping to iedit session.

Namespace

The name of the package is Isearch-light but the lisp file is named isl.el and all symbols are prefixed with “isl-“. For now it is ok like this especially because it is not packaged in (M)Elpa. If any conflicts would happen in the future I may rename package, file and symbols.

install

No installation from (M)Elpa and package.el is provided for now.

From source

Add isl.el to load-path and compile it.

Then add (require 'isl) in your init file.

Even better, you can autoload it:

(autoload 'isl-search "isl" nil t)
(autoload 'isl-narrow-to-defun "isl" nil t)
(autoload 'isl-resume "isl" nil t)

Configure

You may want to disable all Isearch global bindings:

(global-set-key [remap isearch-forward] 'undefined)
(global-set-key [remap isearch-backward] 'undefined)
(global-set-key [remap isearch-forward-regexp] 'undefined)
(global-set-key [remap isearch-backward-regexp] 'undefined)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-r") nil)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-s") nil)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-s") nil)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-r") nil)

And the rebind the necessary keys to isl-* commands:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-s")   'isl-search)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-z")   'isl-narrow-to-defun)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-s") 'isl-resume)

You will find severals user variables prefixed with isl-, see M-x customize-variable.

NOTE: many of them can be toggled while in isl-search session, so you may not need to modify them unless you want to change the default behavior.

Usage

M-x isl-search

The mode-line give you several infos, arrows up/down tell you the direction where you are actually moving, the > and < mean you are either below or above initial position in buffer. Regex or Literal tell you the style of search you are using. Case sensitivity in use is notified by *, 0 or 1 which mean smart, nil or t for case-fold-search.

Here the commands available:

C-s	isl-goto-next
C-r	isl-goto-prev
<down>	isl-goto-next
<up>	isl-goto-prev
C-n	isl-goto-next
C-p	isl-goto-prev
RET	isl-exit-at-point
C-w	isl-yank-word-at-point
C-z	isl-yank-symbol-at-point
M-r	isl-change-matching-style
M-c	isl-select-case-fold-search
M-<	isl-goto-first
M->	isl-goto-last
M-=	isl-goto-closest-from-start
M-s	isl-jump-to-helm-occur
C-;	isl-jump-to-iedit-mode
M-%	isl-query-replace
C-h m	isl-display-or-quit-help
C-q	isl-help-quit
C-’	isl-show-or-hide-context-lines
C-l	isl-recenter
C-v	isl-scroll-up
M-v	isl-scroll-down
C-k	isl-delete-minibuffer-contents
C-j	isl-toggle-multi-search-in-line

Don’t forget C-h m which will show you all these commands while running isearch-light.

NOTE: Another map isl-mini-map is used when excuting-kbd-macro, you may want to modify it accordingly to fit with isl-map.

About multi matching

By default isl-search uses multi matching like Helm, with limitation to symbol, not line like in Helm, that means “foo bar” matches “foo-bar” or “bar-foo” but not a line with “foo” and “bar” inside.

when you want to match e.g. “foo some text bar”, you have to use regexp e.g. “foo.*bar” or switch to multi match line matching with C-j aka isl-toggle-multi-search-in-line.

To use multi matching, separate text with one space, each pattern beginning by “!” will mean match everything but this, e.g. “foo !bar” will not match “foo-bar” but will match “foo-baz”.

Note: You can jump to helm-occur for a line based search at any time. You can also jump to iedit-mode with multi match pattern (you may have an error if all the matches do not refer to the same word or symbol).

Isearch-light vs helm-occur

Isearch-light is a good tool for searching words or symbols in a buffer and even if it can search several words separated by spaces, helm-occur is more efficient for this as it is based on line searching.

Helm-occur is not efficient when you have to search in a buffer with continuous text with no newlines e.g. some logs or debug logs etc… you have better time using isearch-light.

A good compromise is to start searching with isearch-light and if it turns out what you need to match is whole lines instead of words or symbols, switch to helm-occur with isl-jump-to-helm-occur bound by default to M-s.

UPDATE: Isearch-light can now switch to a line based search like helm-occur easily.

Use isearch-light for helm-help

Starting from Emacs-27 Isearch works more or less with unexpected effects, you have better time using isl-search as the search command for helm-help, here how to replace default setting by `isl` in helm-help:

(with-eval-after-load 'helm-lib
  (autoload 'isl-search "isl" nil t)
  (helm-help-define-key "C-s" nil)
  (helm-help-define-key "C-r" nil)
  (helm-help-define-key "C-s" 'isl-search))    

An alternative is to customize `helm-help-hkmap` from the customize interface.