n navigation key can search in the wrong direction after exiting symbol-highlight-transient-state

[jwbowler]

Description

If you enter symbol-highlight-transient-state, search backward, and exit the transient state, n and N are now switched vs. their usual Vim-style behavior.

I have zero experience with ELisp, but, some things I observe from poking around layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-navigation:

• In funcs.el, spacemacs//ahs-ts-on-exit has a comment about "Restore user search direction state..." - it seems relevant, is this just not working?
• In packages.el, the above function is set as the :on-exit of spacemacs|define-transient-state symbol-highlight. But, using edebug-defun on that function, it seems to get called each time I hit the n or p key in symbol-highlight-transient-state, which seems weird?

I observe this behavior on my freshly-installed MacOS Spacemacs as well as my Linux Spacemacs in the office.

Reproduction guide 🪲

• Install a fresh Spacemacs; start Emacs
• Type in scratch buffer: "foo foo foo foo"
• Cursor over the first "foo" and hit * to enter symbol-highlight-transient-state
• Hit p to go to the previous match
• Hit q to exit the transient state

Observed behaviour: 👀 💔
n now searches backward through "foo"s

Expected behaviour: ❤️ 😄
n now searches forward through "foo"s

System Info 💻

• OS: darwin
• Emacs: 29.3
• Spacemacs: 0.999.0
• Spacemacs branch: develop (rev. a58a7d7)
• Graphic display: nil
• Running in daemon: nil
• Distribution: spacemacs
• Editing style: vim
• Completion: helm
• Layers:

(emacs-lisp helm multiple-cursors treemacs)

• System configuration features: ACL GMP GNUTLS JSON LIBXML2 MODULES NOTIFY KQUEUE PDUMPER SQLITE3 THREADS TREE_SITTER ZLIB

Backtrace 🐾

N/A

[fnussbaum]

Thanks for the report, I have drafted a PR that would fix this: #16382

In the meantime, something like the following could serve as a workaround:

(defun fix/spacemacs//ahs-ts-on-exit ()
    (setq evil-ex-search-direction (if spacemacs--ahs-searching-forward 'forward 'backward)))
(advice-add 'spacemacs//ahs-ts-on-exit :after 'fix/spacemacs//ahs-ts-on-exit)