Making ^J and ^H work in / (search)

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

Alexander Berntsen <alexander at plaimi.net> writes:

>>>> I guess, you actually want to make ‘C-h’ equal to ‘DEL’ and ‘C-j’ to
>>>> ‘RET’ *everywhere*, not just in isearch (there is no any evil-mode’s
>>>> search, as far I know), helm, etc.  Nothing is easier:
>>>>
>>>>   (define-key key-translation-map (kbd "C-h") (kbd "DEL"))
>>>>   (define-key key-translation-map (kbd "C-j") (kbd "RET"))
>>>>
>>>> I would not reject ‘C-j’ though, it is useful sometimes to have two
>>>> returns: a ‘smart’ one and a ‘dumb’ one.
>>>
>>> I don't want DEL, I want backspace.
>>
>> Do you have ‘<backspace>’ that is bound somewhere else than ‘DEL’?
>> (See ‘<f1> k <backspace>’.)
>>
>>> So I changed it to (global-set-key (kbd "C-h") (kbd
>>> "<backspace>")) instead of delete-backwards-char. But it still
>>> doesn't work when searching.
>>
>> Is there is any reason why you believe that this should work?  I
>> did not suggest you to do anything like this.
>
> I confused what kbd "DEL" did with what the DEL key does. Using kbd
> "DEL" achieves the same as kbd "<backspace", as far as I can tell.
>
>>> '/ab^J' will bring up search, and add 'ab' followed by literally
>>> the characters '^' and 'J'.
>>
>> No, it’s followed by literally the character ‘^J’ (this is one
>> character — ‘linefeed’ aka ‘\n’ is C notation).
>
> Sorry, I meant visually. It is indeed literally the character '^J'.
>
>
> In the end though, your suggestion unfortunately doesn't solve anything.

Sorry, I’ve missed *when* did you try this suggestion (to use
‘key-translation-map’).  I’ve re-read our conversation (restored in
quotes above) — and all you said is that you had merely ingored it and
tried something else with ‘global-map’ (‘global-set-key’).