Re: A better UI than perform-replace

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> John Yates <address@hidden> writes:

> I am not a power users. It would never occurr to me that the solution of a
> common UI use case would be an invocation of modal behavior.

> Recursive editing is noobie unfriendly. It is not particularly discoverable.
> It requires maintaining a more complex mental model of the editor's state
> while performing the rename. And it requires more key strokes than direct
> support.

Wanting to use Emacs for other editing, while in the middle of a replace
operation, is fairly expert also. We don't use a separate window with "Find
Next" and "Replace" buttons, as graphical editors do: we use a modal prompt in
the mini-buffer. Most Emacs users expect this to mean that they must complete
their operation before Emacs is fully available again.

I agree that recursive editing is not well known, but the right answer may be
education, rather than building new functionality for this one case, just so
people don't have to learn a feature of Emacs that's (a) been available for a
very long time, and (b) is handy in far more circumstances than merely find
and replace.

John