Non-Incremental Search in Emacs

No Comments Written by Etienne Laurin on 2010/09/15 in Code.

Do you sometimes find it annoying when your cursor jumps around the page as you search a large file? Looking for a solution, I discovered Emacs’ non-incremental search mode.

It is triggered by pressing Enter after C-s:

C-s <RET> string <RET>

And for backwards search:

C-r <RET> string <RET>

But after pressing Enter again, the cursor jumps to the text that Emacs found. To go back, use the double shortcut:

C-x C-x

If you use transient-mark-mode, you will want to regroup the mark and point with

C-<SPACE> C-<SPACE>

Happy hacking!