Today’s post is a quick and simple tip from Zachary Kanfer on improving isearch. He likes the way isearch finds its results incrementally but is unhappy with the lack of context concerning the number of results found at each step.
It turns out that it’s easy to fix this. There is a configuration item, isearch-lazy-count, that when set to t will cause the count of prospective matches to be displayed in the minibuffer. There are a couple more configuration items that control the placement and format of the count. See Kanfer’s post for the details.
An alternative, that I use, is swiper-isearch. It also provides a count and displays the line containing each match in the minibuffer. I like it better and remapped Ctrl+s to it instead of isearch. Nonetheless, I have Super+s mapped to isearch so I can use it when I like. It’s worthwhile adding the prospective match count to isearch and it’s easy to do so I will probably add it to my configuration.