Hrvoje Niksic writes: Yeah, this discussion does sound familiar. I think my position was "well, fix this broken code!" and no one else wanted to fix it, so in order to implement the change I would have to fix it. Yes, but this is awfully ad hoc. We don't know what other developers are going to do with the feature. It may be imperative to see all the text that goes in and out of a buffer, even in a Custom buffer. Change functions are very low level, so it is important to keep things clean. If I fix wid-edit.el (assuming its possible) and whatever else we ship that uses buffer modifying change functions, would you be more amenable to disabling buffer modifications while inside a buffer change function?