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I am just creating an issue for the bug report/request that came on Easel mailing list. I'm attaching the quote from user's mail: "After typing Ctrl-s in the editor you should be able to type what you are searching for and find it. Then, subsequent Ctrl-s should let you do the incremental search. Compare this emacs behavior to what NB does when using emacs short-cuts. The default emacs short-cut bindings in NB certainly do not follow this, and I have not been able to manually set short-cuts to make it follow this pattern. In NB, if you type ctrl-s it does nothing." Please reassign this issue to the correct category if I have placed it wrongly.
I recommend that you first familiarize yourself with emacs' ctrl-s behavior. Just bring up emacs, type ctrl-s, give it a search string, type ctrl-s again, and again, and again. Now, notice what happens when you click in the editor! It is a simple behavior, but it has to be mimicked EXACTLY. Thank you. farokh
You can use find next occurence (F3 in netbeans, alt+s in emacs) for similar behavior. F3 searches what was last in searchbar, if nothing it will open searchbar. For behavior as you request, this must be implemented in search code.