Search and Mark

Question

How would I be able to mark a specific occurrence of a searched phrase? In other words, I can use incremental search to search for a phrase, but would like to be able to mark that phrase once I found it. I don't believe this is already implemented into emacs but would be simple to do if I was able to retrieve the location of the searched word in elisp.

Below, you can see that highlighted is the result of searching for the word "buffer." In pink, is the occurrence the cursor is currently on. I would like to edit this word directly. Currently, this can only be done by stopping search, which causes the cursor to position itself at the beginning of "buffer", and then I would need to use ctrl-space to set mark and move forward a word to mark "buffer". This is relatively simple to do for a word, but tedious if I searched for a phrase (which needs to be edited) such as "is for notes" in this example.

Answer 1

Not sure exactly what you're looking for. If what you want to do is to set the mark at the beginning of the final search hit when you exit Isearch with point at the end of that hit, then that means that you want to have Isearch select that search hit when you exit.

If that's what you want then you can get that using library Isearch+ and customizing option isearchp-set-region-flag to non-nil. Or if you want to select the search hit when you exit sometimes, but only on demand, then you can use M-x isearchp-set-region-around-search-target after you exit.

Answer 2

If the use-case is to edit the text you've searched for, then maybe you don't need to worry about marking it at all.

M-% (whilst isearching) starts an interactive search and replace for the search string.

If it's a straight replacement, just enter the new text.

If you want to edit the original text, use the minibuffer history to populate the search string before editing it for the replacement.

The interactive help (? once you've invoked the command) tells you the rest.