Behavior of internal search in a file has changed?

[kilgota banach math auburn edu]

One opens a file for viewing with F3. Then there are two internal search 
methods. One can hit either F7 or / and open a window in which to type 
something to search for. Call it "string" for convenience in what follows.

After this, what _used_ to happen, to the best of my memory, is that the 
search function looks for the _next_ occurrence of "string" which occurs 
_after_ the point where you are in the file. I mean exactly that what I am 
pretty sure used to happen is that, if I open the file and scroll halfway 
through it, then at that point open a search for "string" then the search 
would take me to the next occurrence of "string" which sits in the file 
after the point where I am (which with F3 was taken to be after the top of 
whatever is visible in the terminal window).

What seems to happen for me now is that, if I scroll halfway through the 
file and search at that point for "string" then the search function thinks 
it is more clever than I am, and what I really wanted to do was to go back 
to the beginning of the file, if, say, "string" was to be found on line 3. 
And then if "string" was found, say, 257 times before I got to the point 
in the file to  which I had scrolled by hand, then I have to search 257 
times for "string" in order to get to the point in the file at which I 
wanted to start the search in the first place.

Be assured that the previous functionality was very useful, and I wish I 
had it back. Was this change the result of a conscious design decision? If 
so, I would like to submit my vote on the matter, as a user. You see, if I 
want to search for "string" from the beginning of the file, I can 
assuredly scroll to the beginning of the file and start there, so that is 
not hard at all. But if by conscious intent (and for reasons which seem to 
make a lot of sense to me) I start a search somewhere in the middle of a 
file, I really really really do not want to be forced to go back to the 
first occurrence of "string" near the top of the file.

If you want to know what set me off, I am looking at a log file which 
dumped out the transactions from a USB device. The length of said file is 
709782 bytes -- not even a large file considering what it is. I scrolled 
down to a place where the device starts to download a bunch of data. 
Intending to go to the end of that data block to see what happens next, I 
searched for "transfer" which is found in the file every time there is a 
new URB. I point out that this is a perfectly logical and natural thing to 
want to do. In the event, I was forcibly reminded of an inconvenience 
which I have been suffering since the last time I upgraded mc, for, what I 
just tried to do I used to do routinely and it used to work perfectly 
well.

If this is a problem which can be resolved by a configuration issue, then 
someone please be so kind as to let me know how to do that. Otherwise, if 
this is an internal change and I cannot fix it without editing C code and 
recompiling, I earnestly hope that it will be put back the way it was.


Theodore Kilgore