Re: Detect all changes in a buffer

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

Lars Tveito <larstvei@ifi.uio.no> writes:
>I am developing a minor mode that enables real-time collaboration. I
>wish to detect /all/ changes made to a buffer. So far I'm using
>`before-change-functions' to detect deletions and
>`after-change-functions' to detect insertions.

You might already know about these, but just in case:

There was some work on this in the past -- the effort I remember was based on a collaboration protocol called "Obby", but now that I look at https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing I see there were some other efforts as well.

I don't know if anything there would save you time, but wanted to point it out just in case.

(You raise a good question about `inhibit-modification-hooks', and I don't know the answer to it.)

Best regards,
-Karl

>The problem is that some functions utilizes
>`inhibit-modification-hooks', even though they make changes to the
>buffer. An example is `eshell-send-input'.
>
>The first question is whether you have any suggestions as to how to get
>around this? The second is whether it is considered OK for functions to
>use this hook even though the function makes changes to the buffer? The
>documentation for change hooks states "These hook variables let you
>arrange to take notice of all changes in all buffers" which is not
>really true if changes are done whilst `inhibit-modification-hooks' is
>non-nil.
>
>- Lars