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I have a read-only file that I open in Emacs. I have created a keyboard shortcut to hide some regions of the file. For example:

(defun hide-beginning ()
  (interactive)
  (setq buffer-read-only nil)
  (put-text-property 1 10 'invisible t)
  (setq buffer-read-only t)
  )

However, when I exit the buffer with kill-buffer or rather ido-kill-buffer, I get the question

Buffer myfile.txt modified; kill anyway? (yes or no)

How can this question be avoided?

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  • 1
    If you only care about changes that occur in this function, you can probably use buffer-modified-p and set-buffer-modified-p to store the modified state and restore it after changing the properties.
    – ChrisR
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:59
  • Thanks it works perfectly! I just put (set-buffer-modified-p nil) after I changed the property..
    – Håkon Hægland
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:02
  • @ChrisR: I didn't see your comment before posting. Could you post your comment as an answer so that it could be accepted?
    – Dan ♦
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:05
  • 1
    @HåkonHægland You might want to save value of calling buffer-modified-p at the beginning of the function. That way, if something else modifies the buffer, you will still be prompted about it.
    – zck
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 21:36
  • If you're setting text properties which aren't meant to be saved in a file or copied and yanked, you should probably use overlays instead of text properties. See also What are overlays for, and how do they differ from text properties?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 2:20

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
5

If you only care about changes that occur in this function, you can use buffer-modified-p and set-buffer-modified-p to store the modified state and restore it after changing the properties.

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The manual notes that you can use set-buffer-modified-p with a nil argument to flag the buffer as unmodified. Hence, if you want your function not to modify the buffer, you could do the following:

(defun hide-beginning ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((buffer-read-only nil)
        (buffer-modified (buffer-modified-p)))
    (put-text-property 1 10 'invisible t)
    (set-buffer-modified-p buffer-modified)))
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4
  • Thanks! Don't you need to restore buffer-read-only at the end of the function?
    – Håkon Hægland
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:09
  • 1
    @HåkonHægland: when you let-bind buffer-read-only, you are binding it dynamically for the lifespan of the function -- basically, you're temporarily overriding its value.
    – Dan ♦
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:12
  • 2
    @HåkonHægland the best approach is to letbind inhibit-read-only to t. That will cover more cases than just setting buffer-read-only to nil.
    – Malabarba
    Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:48
  • 2
    Unconditionally marking the buffer as unmodified is very dangerous. You should do that only if the buffer was unmodified in the first place, otherwise this has a high risk of resulting in unsaved changes sooner or later.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 0:23
2

The macro with-silent-modifications (in subr.el) seems to exist for exactly this use case:

Execute BODY, pretending it does not modify the buffer.
...
Typically used around modifications of text-properties which do
not really affect the buffer's content.
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