I am monkeying with the idea of switching to emacs as my test editor. One major annoyance I'm having is that emacs regexes suffer from "backslashitis" in compared to the much more elegant perl regexes. This makes for frustrations when running search-and-replace operations, and means that I have to backslashify all the regexes I had working for more modern editors. Is there some elegant way of dealing with this? Googling around didn't achieve much.

For what it's worth, it appears that PCRE regexes never made it into emacs search-and-replace because the {} symbols would have gummed up something major, with regards to backwards compatibility.

Any and all wisdom appreciated.

Thanks monks.

UPDATE: Also asked at comp.emacs

UPDATE 2: Anyone got a regex to "emacsify" non-emacs regex? Or "demacsify" emacs regex?

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