Question

It’s not that convenient when you do a typo during an incremental search and the search string receives the wrongly typed character. Is there a way to prevent this. As if control-g was pressed automatically on error.

For example we have the following text:

keywords
keys

Default emacs behavior:

• We start incremental search and search for “keyz”
• The “keyz” is displayed in the search echo area and the “key” part in “keywords” is higlighted
• We press s
• “keys” won’t be found, the cursor stays on the “keywords” line, search echo area displays “keyzs”, which is not convenient

Needed behavior:

• We start incremental search and search for “keyz”
• The “key” is displayed in the search echo area and the “key” part in “keywords” is higlighted
• We press s
• “keys” is found and highlited

Answer 1

You could try something like

(defadvice isearch-printing-char (before drop-mismatches-on-next-char activate)
  (while (or (not isearch-success) isearch-error)
    (isearch-pop-state)))