🚀 go-pugleaf

GNU Emacs 18.55.1 of Tue Oct 31 1989 on marat (hpux)

I find the behavior of ^W (search-yank-word-character) paradoxical in
backwards incremental search (isearch-backward).

In isearch-forward, ^W snarfs the following word as part of the search
string, then searches, leaving you at the end of the word you just
added--so if you want to add another word from the original position,
you just type ^W again.

In isearch-backward, ^W also snarfs the following (and not the
preceding) word, then searches, so you end up at a different occurence
of that word, meaning that you cannot continue typing ^W to add more
of the original occurence.

It would seem to me more consistent that ^W in backward search snarf
the word preceding the current cursor, thus leaving you "at the same
place".

Another possible solution would be to snarf following words, but to
arrange things so that the cursor doesn't move.  This is not a bad
solution, but is more complicated to implement, because you can no
longer use the search cursor to decide where the word you want to add
starts...  And anyway, you already have this functionality by changing
the direction of the search before using ^W, and changing back before
continuing (i.e. ^R foobar^S^W^W^W^R^R).

On a somewhat different subject, it might be nice if ^W in re-search
used \W+ instead of the actual characters between words....