Re: Todays exercise of sanity (or does "see" really match "not"?)

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 15:20:34 -0800, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> In reply to David's point about preview-latex needing to search and find the
>> meta-text: I agree that programs need to be able to find meta-text. The
>> point is to separate such meta-text from the content - or at least be _able_
>> to separate/distinguish it. In most modes, at least, Info-search should not
>> find strings that are in meta-text (if this is not to difficult to fix).
>
> How about a text/overlay property that says what text to use for
> i-searching instead of the underlying text?  Then the mode itself
> (or whoever added the corresponding display/invisible property)
> could make exactly the right decision -- e.g. David would add the
> underlying text,

David would do no such thing because searches have to end up at the
correct corresponding buffer position, not inside of some overlay
property.  Which is not even possible if I do a search and replace on
a string bracketing an overlay boundary.

> but info mode could add the text shown by the display property.
>
> Something like:
>
>    (overlay-put ov 'isearch-text "This is the search text")
>    (overlay-put ov 'display (some-bit-map))

I think it is a bad idea.  What about matches partly in the text,
partly out of it?  What should get displayed?

The underlying basic unit of a buffer is text.  If you don't want it
manipulated as text, then don't use text in the first place.  Of
course, this means that we might have to rethink using "x" as a
character to carry images, and use something non-printable.  Or it
might be a good idea to have a property to mark text non-searchable
completely for this case.  But we should not build a completely
separate reality just for searching.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum