20.1.6 Isearch Yanking

The characters C-w and C-y can be used in incremental search to grab text from the buffer into the search string. This makes it convenient to search for another occurrence of text at point. C-w copies the character or word after point as part of the search string, advancing point over it. (The decision, whether to copy a character or a word, is heuristic.) Another C-s to repeat the search will then search for a string including that character or word.

C-y is similar to C-w but copies all the rest of the current line into the search string. If point is already at the end of a line, it grabs the entire next line. Both C-y and C-w convert the text they copy to lower case if the search is currently not case-sensitive; this is so the search remains case-insensitive.

C-M-w and C-M-y modify the search string by only one character at a time: C-M-w deletes the last character from the search string and C-M-y copies the character after point to the end of the search string. An alternative method to add the character after point into the search string is to enter the minibuffer by M-e and to type C-f at the end of the search string in the minibuffer.

The character M-y copies text from the kill ring into the search string. It uses the same text that C-y as a command would yank. Mouse-2 in the echo area does the same. See section Yanking.