Bastien Guerry has a nice tutorial on isearch available on his M-x doctor RET site. Unless you’re really an expert on isearch, there’s a lot you don’t know about it. You can, for example, search for the word or character at point. You can ignore multiple spaces so that they get treated the same as one space.
There are many more shortcuts that you probably didn’t know about. Rather than list them all, I’ll just list these items that Guerry says he wishes he had known about sooner:
| Ctrl+s Meta+e | Edit search string |
| Ctrl+s Ctrl+w | Search for word at point |
| Ctrl+s Meta+r | Toggle regex search |
| Ctrl+s Meta+s o | Run occur on the search string |
| Ctrl+s Ctrl+Meta+i | Complete the current search string |
There’s lots more so be sure to take a look at Guerry’s post.
UPDATE : Fixed key sequence for search word at point.