Mark Thomas <mthomas(a)jprc.com&gt; writes: Yes. C-g cancels the incremental search, which means that it backs up the point to where it was, and forgets the old search string. The change happened because I merged isearch-mode.el with FSF Emacs. I was careful not to destroy useful XEmacs features in the process, but I think this behaviour is acceptable. For me it doesn't. ESC ESC ESC is bound to isearch-cancel, and behaves almost exactly the same as C-g, bound to isearch-abort.