Find-and-replace interface about ctrlf

[raxod502]

No, aside from that it should be a similar interface to the one used in other text editors, but it does sound reasonable to add "replace" to "find".

[dylanjm]

I really like the anzu approaches find and replace by interactively highlighting the regexp as you type it in, and then shows an inline replacement after matching on the regexp.

[raxod502]

Yeah, that's a nice interface. See also visual-regexp which implements a similar idea although not quite as attractively.

[AmaiKinono]

I'll write down a somewhat "corner" case here.

The one thing that pushed me to switch from ivy+swiper to selectrum+CTRLF is I found sometimes I need to find and replace ^$ (blank lines). There's bugs in swiper that make this don't work. Once it's fixed (in an ad-hoc way) and then there's regression that breaks this again.

I hope this works. Now CTRLF doesn't deal with zero-width matches, which make sense. But when it can do replace, I hope it works when I want to do this. Of course I can switch to isearch or query-replace-regexp to do this, but If the user already sticks to CTRLF, it would be a bonus if they can do all kinds of search/replace in it.

[raxod502]

I didn't think of zero-length matches that only match at certain points of the buffer. I think that they're a reasonable thing to want to be supported, but somebody would have to do the work to make it so the code for them isn't a disgusting mess. It's also an open question how to indicate that a zero-length match is selected, since there are no characters to highlight.

[raxod502]

Zero-length matches are now implemented, so all the machinery exists to support replacement as well. I do not plan to work on this anytime soon, however.