two questions about Slackware's "mc-20090514_git"

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

First one:

There is some behavior about searching, to which I am not accustomed. 
Namely, when one uses F3 to view then "/" or F7 allows one to search. That 
is, of course, as usual. If one is editing a file with F4, then again F7 
is used for doing a search. That is, of course, also as usual.

But what seems to me to be new is that if I do a search, then close the 
file, and want to open either it or another file in the same directory and 
do another search for the same thing, now the contents to be searched for 
are gone and need to be re-entered in the search window. I could just 
swear that the content of the search used to be persistent, and now it is 
volatile. Now, even if one is opening the same file again, that which was 
being searched for has disappeared. I think it was much more convenient 
the other way.

Second one:

Again we have the feature in the editor that tabs are marked thus:

<------>err_code = reg_w(gspca_dev, 11);
<------>if (err_code < 0)
<------><------>return err_code;

This is not a bad thing if one is doing some kernel coding and has to obey 
the rules. It certainly does distinguish tabs from spaces. But look what 
it did when I used the mouse to copy it over here! Since some kind of 
meta-characters are used, why exactly do they have to be seen and copied 
thus by the mouse?

Even worse, when I create a new file called codesample.txt and use the 
mouse to copy over the same three lines, now I literally have the arrow 
characters in the file, not tabs. But of course they are supposed to 
be tabs, not arrow characters. So it was OK to move the snippet of code 
over, but now every line has to be edited by hand. Ouch.

Well, one might think that I was stupid and what I really ought to do is 
to use F3 instead of having opened it with F4. But if I do that then at 
the beginning of each line I have spaces instead of tabs. So, as far as 
having to edit each line after copying, the result is equally unpleasant.

Interestingly, if I use "less" to open the file to be copied from, and 
copy into a file which was opened by mcedit, then, upon checking, it 
appears the tabs do get preserved. But no arrow symbols appear even 
though the tabbing has survived the mouse-copy operation. Weird. Also 
inconsistent.

Therefore, the question boils down to the following:

Is it somehow possible to mark tabs (that is nice for coding, obviously) 
but when one copies using the mouse from one file to another, the tabs are 
preserved, and appropriate marking for them is used or introduced, but 
the marking for them (if it was already present) is not transformed into 
actual characters, which then need to be manually removed from the copied 
text?

Theodore Kilgore