On 1/14/22 3:29 PM, Ján Tomko wrote:
> On a Friday in 2022, Laine Stump wrote:
>> Since it's Friday and we're talking about personal preferences - I
>> personally dislike the use of i and j (and anything else with a single
>> letter) as variable names, because it makes using a text search for
>> occurences pointless. Sure, longer variable names could also be a
>> substring of something else, and any variable could be re-used
>> elsewhere, but even then a search is mildly usable.
>
> Well, you need to search for the word i instead of the letter i.
>
> grep has the '-w' switch for that, or you can specify some boundaries:
>     \bi\b
>     \<i\>
>
> vim searches for the word under the cursor with '*' by default
>
> Surely other search tools have some equivalent.

This forced me to go look for it in emacs, and after 28 years, I've
learned about isearch-forward-symbol-at-point, which is by default bound
to [alt-s .]. But that's just another different keystroke I have to
remember. Much easier if I can just use an expansion of the ctl-s
(incremental search) that I already know and use for pretty much all
searching within a single file.