[somat]

Apologies for bringing vi into it but wouldn't the vi / or ? search be even closer? put your search in then hit n to repeat.

I think the real genius of the interface is reducing it down to a set of dedicated keys that always work. It is hard to explain how good an interface feels if you can get it down to one action. The closest common analog I can think of is the X11 single click paste. When you spell it out "well, copy/paste changes from [select, ctl+c, click, ctl+v] to [select, click]" it does not sound like much. But It flows so much better and I have to admit I get all sorts of grumpy when going back to a windows machine and I do not have my single click paste. On reflection drag/drop might be close to single click paste. But I never do it. Does anyone use drag/drop for common editing?

[kragen]

No, vi's / or ? isn't incremental. This was one of the significant differences between vi and Emacs in the 01980s and 90s, when "vi vs. Emacs" was a thing. Vim added incremental search as one of its enhancements over vi as an option sometime in the 90s and made it the default much more recently, maybe in the last 15 years.

I believe I did have a co-worker who used drag-and-drop for common editing in NEdit in 02005. On that team we used pair programming, so I had the opportunity to observe my co-workers' editor habits in detail. In more recent work I have not had that opportunity.

[anthk]

nvi does. Also,

   set incsearch

at .exrc