It looks like force-window-update is the magic sauce. I've now noticed that my solution fails sometimes during buffer preview with vertico. I'm hoping this will fix these edge cases. I will try it tomorrow.

I might be able to use this to simplify what I have, but it doesn't address my problem. The issue is I want to restore the default minibuffer colors, not change them to another color.

No, I don't want to see them; they're distracting. I see your point. The read only part doesn't really matter. The buffers I'm looking at happen to be read only because they are the output of a process. But I would want the ^M gone even if the buffer weren't marked read only.

This works great. I just added it to my .emacs file. Now that I've quickly looked over your code, I understand your point about it not making sense to use isearch internals in Julia-mode. In any case it solves my problem. The only minor wart is it doesn't check the mode, so I get the same behavior in every mode. In practice, this won't be an issue.

Thanks, I'll let you know as soon as I get a chance to try it. If it works, I may just post a link to your answer. They can do as they please. I think they understand their solution isn't perfect, but I'm sure they are busy with more important development.

Stefan, I appreciate your helpful input -- the last sentence in particular. The point I'm struggling to get across is that I lose the convenience of having Julia-mode figure out the correct character for me, and since it is a programming language, I can't risk looking up the wrong Unicode character since some can look the same (see stevegj's comments on the thread I linked to). What prompted my question initially was that I looking for a single omega character. Not knowing the code, the next easiest thing was to type it in the buffer and then copy into isearch.

I had looked over the section on Input Methods, but since they aren't using a standard input (i.e. they define a hash table of their own mappings), doesn't this effectively break Input Methods? It seems like you would need to access the julia-latexsubs table to search... or maybe I'm just confused...

In julia-mode, I can type \omega - TAB, and it will expand to the UTF-8 omega character. I have no way of doing this in incremental search. As a result, I can either (1) copy/paste the character I'm looking for into the minibuffer, or (2) I think it's possible to directly enter the unicode hex, but I would have to look-up the hex code. Is there an easier way?