On Apr 10, 2011, at 11:02 AM, Andreas Röhler wrote:

> Am 10.04.2011 10:49, schrieb Tom:
>> I know there are the `invisible' and `intangible' properties to
>> hide parts of the buffer from the user, but these hidden regions
>> are apparently not hidden from lisp commands like
>> query-replace-regexp.
>> 
> 
> If query-replacs goes into `intangible' sounds like a bug for me.
> 
> Whilst with `invisible' it seems reasonable. Emacs don't need eyes... :)

`intangible' is a new concept to me.  For anyone else trying to follow along, intangible is documented in the Elisp manual (but not in Emacs' Concept Index which is the first place I looked).

One thing it mentions:

>      When the variable `inhibit-point-motion-hooks' is non-`nil', the
>      `intangible' property is ignored.


I assume that is not set but it might be.

From grep'ing the source and looking at what is in the Elisp manual and the comments in the code, I too would expect searches to not enter intangible areas.  The code also mentioned "sticky forward" and "sticky backward" -- not sure what that is (yet) but that might be affecting things too.