Re: Question about copy-region-as-kill

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, 2002-04-06 at 19:56, Miles Bader wrote:
> Colin Walters <address@hidden> writes:
> > In the interim, I will change ibuffer to use overlays for some
> > properties.  But for what it's worth, I think we should move towards an
> > XEmacs-style "extent" mechanism.
> 
> I thought `extent's were more like overlays, except optionally
> persistent.  No?

Ok, I looked at the XEmacs manual a bit, and yes, that appears to be the
case.  Note that they have built a text properties/overlays type API on
top of their extent mechanism.

> In any case, perhaps you're right that text-properties should be
> optionally buffer-specific, but that doesn't mean it's the proper thing
> to get rid of the distinction between text-properties and overlays.
> 
> Overlays are distinct _objects_ that can be manipulated as such, and
> lend their properties to the underlying buffer they're in, whereas
> text-properties are not independent of the text at all.
> 
> These very different interfaces are both useful in different circumstances.

That's what I thought at first, too...but I've personally *never*
encountered a situation in which I've wanted to use the overlay API.