15.1.5 Isearch Yanking

Within incremental search, C-y (isearch-yank-kill) appends the current kill to the search string. M-y (isearch-yank-pop), if called after C-y, replaces that appended text with an earlier kill, similar to the usual M-y (yank-pop) command (see Yanking). Mouse-2 appends the current X selection (see Primary Selection).

C-w (isearch-yank-word-or-char) appends the next character or word at point to the search string. This is an easy way to search for another occurrence of the text at point. (The decision of whether to copy a character or a word is heuristic.)

Similarly, M-s C-e (isearch-yank-line) appends the rest of the current line to the search string. If point is already at the end of a line, it appends the next line. With a prefix argument n, it appends the next n lines.

If the search is currently case-insensitive, both C-w and M-s C-e convert the text they copy to lower case, so that the search remains case-insensitive.

C-M-w (isearch-del-char) deletes the last character from the search string, and C-M-y (isearch-yank-char) appends the character after point to the search string. An alternative method to add the character after point is to enter the minibuffer with M-e (see Repeat Isearch) and type C-f at the end of the search string in the minibuffer.