I ran into a problem when searching for text strings like ".ini" in the "Find this text string:". The dots get escaped by a '\' correctly, but when egrepping the characters after '\' get clobbered by '\n'. See the patch. I think the comment before the change is wrong. It would be nice to hear from someone who has the knowledge.
I noticed if I type "." as the first two characters, I get just a ".". I would like know know what the purprose of this is.
You're about a year late with this patch. This was fixed in version 15.8b already.