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I miss the emacs behavior for incremental search. In emacs, we can do this:

  1. C-s
  2. key in search text, i.e. "button"

The first occurance of button will be found. If you continue to press C-s, the next occurance will be found. It seems to me that IntelliJ is close to this, except that you need to press a different keystroke for the second search. To me, this gets annoying. I would much rather press the same keystoke for the first as well as subsequent searches.

Is this possible in IntelliJ? It works great in Eclipse with emacs keybindings.

Edit: I opened up a bounty on this question. Is there an example of a similar implementation of this functionality written as a plug-in or patch to IntelliJ IDEA?

Gary
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2 Answers2

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In newer releases of IntelliJ, incremental search uses arrow keys to navigate up/down on search term hits. E.g.:

  1. C-s (if using emacs key-bindings)
  2. key in search text
  3. up/down arrow keys to navigate up/down through matching search terms
Malina Kirn
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There is a request in IDEA issue tracker submitted 2 years ago: Emacs-Mode: Incremental Search Again should be mapped to Ctrl-S,Ctrl-R after first search.

As IDEA is open source now, anyone can submit a patch implementing this feature and it will be committed to the next IDEA version.

CrazyCoder
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  • So I guess JetBrains is not interested in adding this feature? – Gary Jul 27 '10 at 15:12
  • @Gray: *CrazyCoder* is one of the IDEA dev... JetBrains precisely open sourced IntelliJ IDEA so that **other** people can contribute too. – SyntaxT3rr0r Dec 20 '10 at 22:24