🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9106041751.AA21076@anywhere> aks%anywhere@hub.ucsb.edu (Alan Stebbens) wrote:
>> An ugly solution would involve remembering the modifiable region or
>> rectangle and rebinding every key so that its behavior did not extend
>> outside that area.
> 
> Why is this ugly?  Each key can be rebound to a common function which
> checks the location of the cursor, and if in an editable field, does
> "self-insert-character", otherwise does nothing or an error.

Well, it just *is* ugly :-)  But one reason that it is bad is that it 
causes too many undo boundaries to be pushed.  Self-insert is somewhat
of a special case down in the guts of the command, and there doesn't
seem to be any way to exactly duplicate its funtionality in elisp.  If
you type a sequence of N characters which are all bound to self-insert,
and then execute undo, all of those characters will be uninserted.  But
if they're not bound to the self-insert subr, undo will pull up one
character at a time.  

I shadow the definition of self-insert for mail-abbrevs.el, and get around
this to some extent by stomping on the buffer-undo-list directly, but it's
not 100% accurate (sometimes it removes too many undo boundaries.)

And as someone else pointed out, ^W will still work on readonly regions
if point is in a writable region.

	-- Jamie