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Normally, scrolling commands exit incremental search. If you change
the variable isearch-allow-scroll
to a non-nil
value,
that enables the use of the scroll-bar, as well as keyboard scrolling
commands like C-v, M-v, and C-l (see Scrolling).
This applies only to calling these commands via their bound key
sequences—typing M-x will still exit the search. You can give
prefix arguments to these commands in the usual way. This feature
won’t let you scroll the current match out of visibility, however.
The isearch-allow-scroll
feature also affects some other
commands, such as C-x 2 (split-window-below
) and C-x
^ (enlarge-window
), which don’t exactly scroll but do affect
where the text appears on the screen. It applies to any command whose
name has a non-nil
isearch-scroll
property. So you can
control which commands are affected by changing these properties.
For example, to make C-h l usable within an incremental search
in all future Emacs sessions, use C-h c to find what command it
runs (see Key Help), which is view-lossage
. Then you can
put the following line in your init file (see Init File):
(put 'view-lossage 'isearch-scroll t)
This feature can be applied to any command that doesn’t permanently change point, the buffer contents, the match data, the current buffer, or the selected window and frame. The command must not itself attempt an incremental search.