What is the meaning of the # character that is automatically inserted when calling `consult`?

Question

For example, when calling consult-line-multi, the minibuffer starts with #, which is annoying when using C-a to edit the query.

Answer 1

It indicates that consult should split your query on #.

Consult splits your search query according to a style, defined by consult-async-split-style. The default style is 'perl, which allows you to define multiple search terms separated by the first character of the search box (with # inserted for your convenience) if it is a punctuation character.

For example

If you are searching for a line that contains both bytes and bin, you could type #bytes#bin into consult-line-multi and get search results like this:

Note that both Bin and bytes are highlighted.