Re: Question about copy-region-as-kill

[Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>]

On Sat, 2002-04-06 at 18:03, Alex Schroeder wrote:
> John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > And whether these are stripped at kill or yank, I don't care.  I just
> > don't want read-only copied around when I kill text from Eshell, and
> > then yank it into an e-mail message!
> 
> Right.  Another example: When you use Colin's ibuffer.el and copy some
> text from there (such as the file name of a buffer), it will have a
> local keymap with totally weird mappings (eg. for RET and other common
> keys) and it not entirely obvious how to get rid of them.

Yes.  Richard and I discussed this at length in private email.  My
feelings on the subject are that the separation of overlays and text
properties doesn't make sense.  I *always* find myself wanting a
text-properties like API, but just sometimes do I want to make the
properties specific to the buffer.  For example, I very commonly attach
a property to text, using `propertize', and do things like search
forward in a buffer for the next piece of text which has a specific
property (e.g. `next-single-property-change').  I have *never* wanted to
know things like where all the "overlays" (i.e. regions of text with
buffer-specific properties) in the buffer are (e.g. `overlay-lists'), or
where the next overlay is (e.g. `next-overlay-change').  

In the interim, I will change ibuffer to use overlays for some
properties.  But for what it's worth, I think we should move towards an
XEmacs-style "extent" mechanism.

[ Richard, do you mind if I make our discussion available? ]