Re: `*' interactive spec in some text-killing functions

[David Kastrup]

"Juanma Barranquero" <address@hidden> writes:

> On 6/27/07, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> The purpose of not having `*' presumably is to have them affect the
>> kill-ring.  In order to provide similar behavior upon multiple kills
>> as in a non-readonly-buffer, it appears reasonable to move across the
>> (non-happening) kill.
>
> I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean that people routinely does
> kill operations on a read-only buffer in order to copy text to the
> kill ring?

(info "(emacs) Killing")

[...]

       You cannot kill read-only text, since such text does not allow
    any kind of modification.  But some users like to use the kill
    commands to copy read-only text into the kill ring, without
    actually changing it.  Therefore, the kill commands work specially
    in a read-only buffer: they move over text, and copy it to the
    kill ring, without actually deleting it from the buffer.
    Normally, kill commands beep and display an error message when
    this happens.  But if you set the variable `kill-read-only-ok' to
    a non-`nil' value, they just print a message in the echo area to
    explain why the text has not been erased.

>> Uh what?  Switching to overwrite-mode/binary-overwrite-mode does not
>> change the buffer, does it?
>
> No. But it seems like an error to *interactively* change to
> overwrite-mode in a read-only buffer, doesn't it?

Why?  It does not make the act of typing characters more or less
legitimate.

-- 
David Kastrup