I have written some code that makes the first line read-only: (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (set-text-properties (point-at-bol) (point-at-eol) '(read-only t)) ) When I try to remove all text-properties: (condition-case err (save-excursion (set-text-properties (point-min) (point-max) nil)) (error (message "dmp-error:err=%s" err))) It barfs with the following error message: dmp-error:err=(text-read-only) How do I go about removing the read-only property of the text? TIA, Davin