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

[Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com>]

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, 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 assume an implementation of this would be rather inefficient,
because the text wouldn't be in the buffer and the regexp search
primitives work directly on the buffer-gap data structures -- but I
assume these cases are relatively rare, and doesn't the
isearch-invisible hack have to deal with similar cases anyway?]

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.