[Cc'ing back to xemacs-beta] Paul Foley <mycroft(a)actrix.gen.nz&gt; writes: More or less. The usual cause of an Ebola notice at the beginning or end of a buffer is due to use of preceding-char and following-char. Those functions return integer 0 at the boundary. Since they really want to return something that cannot be a character, this is O.K. Kind of yucky, but O.K. We have replacement functions `char-after' and `char-before' that return nil at buffer boundaries, but they're not really needed except for pedants. In general, an Ebola notice of a comparison of a character and integer 0 when generated from usage of preceding-char and following-char is not Ebola and is safe usage. That might well be Ebola. Please post the notices you are getting. If you can figure out which file they are coming from, evaluate that file in an XEmacs buffer and repeat the action that caused the notice -- the stacktraces will be that much better. That's correct. Yup. Yes. It is also _incorrect_ (and Ebola) to do something like (eq ?B (1+ ?A)). Arithmetic on characters is allowed, but turns the characters into integers. You would have to do (eq ?B (int-char (1+ ?A))) to make it work right.