My muscle-memory still keeps pressing ^W when an incremental search reaches a word that I'm searching for, expecting the search string to be completed by the word under point.

I would settle for having it not abort the search altogether, maybe bleeping to indicate that something went wrong (key not recognized), and then let me continue to extend the search string by hand, or press ^S again to keep searching.

I would be delighted if Zile gains ^W support :)

Emacs isearch has a whole bunch of extra features, many quite desirable, but it 's many aborting my search with ^W that is making me do every incremental search twice (with same swearing in between) ! ;)