bug#70820: [PATCH] Editable grep buffers

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Visuwesh <visuweshm@gmail.com>
> Cc: 70820@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 08 May 2024 08:52:51 +0530
> 
> [செவ்வாய் மே 07, 2024] Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> > Thanks for working on this.
> >
> > I wonder if this could be somehow either based on 
> 
> Basing it on occur-edit-mode would be a lot more work I think, but I
> understand your concern wrt it being already established and bug-free,
> etc.  This was my original plan but I bailed since the occur buffer's
> text-properties has marker objects (IIRC) but I want to avoid using
> markers since having many buffers open was a personal pet peeve of mine,
> along with the slow-typing experience due to occur's
> after-change-function immediately reflecting the changes in the original
> buffer.  The latter is avoided in my patch since we commit the changes
> only at the end so the typing during the edit is smooth.

I think having similar features that work very differently is not a
good thing for Emacs.  So I urge you to reconsider your decisions and
make this more like occur-edit-mode.  In particular, I don't
understand the difficulty with using the markers and what does it have
to do with the ability of having many Grep buffers.

> This is what I am aiming for ideally since I am a fan of its interface
> myself (preferring it over xref).  The major difference between
> occur-edit-mode and my patch's grep-edit-minor-mode is that it is
> implemented as a minor mode: I chose a minor-mode because all the buffer
> local variables that are required to make the commands from the *grep*
> buffer functional are killed when switching major-modes (so even g
> doesn't work!). We could work around this by marking the relevant
> variables permanent-local but this feels unclean?

I don't think I understand this difficulty, either: with
occur-edit-mode it is solved by making occur-edit-mode be derived from
occur-mode.  Couldn't you do the same with your mode?