Mac – How to search/replace string for the whole buffer in Emacs without going back to the beginning

By default, Emacs doesn't ask you if you want to kill the buffer. It does ask you which buffer you want to kill.

If you don't want to be asked which buffer you want to kill, you can use this:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x k") 'kill-this-buffer)

If you're being prompted for confirmation, then there's something in your .emacs (or the site specific initialziation). Try running emacs -q to check Emacs w/out your .emacs.

Note: Verified with Emacs 23.2.

Emacs has replace-regexp which lets you do search and replace with regular expressions. I'm not aware of any tool that interactively previews replacements but there are several tools that allow you to interactively build the regular expressions used to do search and replace:

Emacs comes with re-builder. M-x re-builder will open a small buffer where can construct your regexp. It will highlight all matches in your current buffer with each group uniquely colored. Here is a nice summary about it.

Then there is re-builder+ which allows you to call the replace command with the regexp you build. But replacing is not interactive.

The last tool I know of is regex-tool which gives you a three buffer view with your text, your regex and the matched groups.

Those tools don't provide everything that Evil does by your description but they cover what I think the hardest part of searching and replacing with regular expression.

If you want to run it only on a region of the buffer you can use C-x n n to narrow to the selected region (between mark and point) or C-x n p to narrow to the current page. And then afterwards C-x n w to widen again to the whole buffer.