RE: Emacs manual nodes about text replacement

[Drew Adams]

> >> Recently Yidong rewrote many parts of the documentation, so
> >> please refer to a newer version.
> >
> > Looking at the CVS version today, it seems to reflect the same
> > structure.
> 
> Your opening statement
>   The main node, Replace, starts by saying that you don't use global
>   search-and-replace that much in Emacs.
> is not true, in the latest version of the manual anyway.

Yes, this opening sentence:

 Global search-and-replace operations are not needed
 often in Emacs, but they are available.

was changed to this in Emacs 23 (good):

 Emacs provides several commands for performing
 search-and-replace operations.

So you can skip that first statement I made. AFAICT, the rest of my message is
still pertinent.

The main points: The presentation is backward and misleading. Emphasize
query-replace, not unconditional replace. Present the information top-down, not
bottom up. Give an overview of what you can do before the details about how to
do it. Make it clear that all of the fancy stuff applies to query-replace too,
not just to unconditional replace.

Please see the original message for details.