RE: short regexp to match any character?

[Drew Adams]

    > I'm thinking it would help Emacs users to make it easy
    > (short) to match any character, including newline. Am I missing
    > something that's already there? If not, would this be a useful
    > feature to add?

    I think this feature could be implemented by analogy with
    search-spaces-regexp and search-whitespace-regexp, i.e.
    after setting a new variable `search-dot-regexp' to "\\(.\\|[\\n]\\)",
    `.' would match newlines too.

Yes, and it would be good to have a key (perhaps `C-.') bound in the Isearch
map to toggle the newline sensitivity of dot (just like toggling case
sensitivity. That way, when searching, you could change the value of
`search-dot-regexp' on the fly.