Re: does emacs support incremental searching for partial matches?

[Tim X]

Leh CHAO <lehchao@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering if emacs has built-in support for incremental searching
> for partial matches, such as searching for 'memcache' matches
> 'memorycache'. It would be really helpful to me when I'm working on
> Visual C++ code because the programmers tend to use long variable
> names.
>
> Thanks!
>
> eric
>

Yes, you have regexp-search 

,----[ C-h k  CONTROL meta s  ]
|  CONTROL meta s runs the command isearch-forward-regexp, which is an
|  interactive compiled Lisp function in `isearch.el'.
| 
| It is bound to CONTROL meta s , <menu-bar> <edit> <search> <i-search>
| <isearch-forward-regexp> .
| 
| (isearch-forward-regexp &optional NOT-REGEXP NO-RECURSIVE-EDIT)
| 
| Do incremental search forward for regular expression.
| With a prefix argument, do a regular string search instead.
| Like ordinary incremental search except that your input is treated
| as a regexp.  See the command `isearch-forward' for more information.
| 
| In regexp incremental searches, a space or spaces normally matches
| any whitespace (the variable `search-whitespace-regexp' controls
| precisely what that means).  If you want to search for a literal space
| and nothing else, enter C-q SPC.
| 
| [back]
`----

However, from your description, it sounds like what you really want is
to use emacs' TAGS facility, which will help you find specific code
'tags'. Also look into imenu, speedbar and cedet. Emacs has a lot of
tools to support coding, particularly with languages like C/C++. Some of
the tools take a bit o effort to get configured the first time, but once
you have learnt them, they make things very productive/easy. 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au