Re: how to activate region

[Samuel Wales]

I did try the above solutions before posting.  They were the most
obvious things to try.

They do not work.

When transient-mark-mode is off, you can temporarily activate it with
c-spc c-spc /and then moving point/.  That is not a solution because I
want to convert the /existing/ non-active region into an active one.

Remember that a region is just point and mark.  An /active/ region is
different.  Some commands require the region to be active.

As I mentioned, c-spc c-spc has the side effect of setting the mark.
You will notice that when you set the mark, point equals mark.

When point equals mark, there is no useful region.  Therefore c-x c-x
does nothing useful when you do that.

Suppose I have a region already.  Perhaps you are thinking that c-x
c-x will activate it?  No, remember that transient-mark-mode is off.
That does not work.

So you see, c-x c-x is useless for making the existing region active,
and c-spc c-spc is useless for making the existing region active.

My original question remains unanswered.

---------------
When transient-mark-mode is off, there must be a way to activate the
existing region for commands that require it to be active.  Anybody
know what it is?  The manual and apropos have yielded nothing so far.

Thanks.
---------------

Am I mistaken?  Was my question answered?  It seems to me that there
were a lot of answers to questions that I did not ask.  Perhaps we get
a lot of /those/ questions on the list and it seemed like mine was
similar?

Thanks.