Question

Given such text

Hello, World

I do incremental search for “world”

C-s World

The text is highlihted

Hello, World

Now I would like to type new text “All” instead of the highlighted and get:

Hello, All

How can I do this? (Notice, I am NOT looking for “query-replace”, or alike). Ideally it have to be some thing like this:

C-s World BS All

Answer 1

Well you can’t use backspace because that key is required to modify your query.

I have this in my init:

(defun le::isearch-kill-result ()
  (interactive)
  (if (use-region-p)
      (call-interactively 'kill-region)
    (kill-region (point) isearch-other-end))
  (isearch-exit))
(define-key isearch-mode-map [(control w)] 'le::isearch-kill-result)

My point is never at anything useful when I search, so I don’t mind overriding
C-w, you may want to pick another key.