@ArthurMilchior, preserving the cursor position sounds useful but is not possible with the current implementation. The search text gets parsed to an AST and then that AST is written to a string, there is no link between the two strings and their characters.
@dae, I only speak as a user here, so if the majority wants the quotes to be gone, that’s what Anki should go with. Please don’t compromise if I’m the only one with this view. 