share text in diff files, database, registers, soft links for regions

[Marcus Harnisch]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Uwe Brauer writes:
>  >     -  share common text in files:
>  > 
>  >        Sometimes  I  have the  same text in  different  files. Of
>  >        course not the whole file,  because otherwise I could just
>  >        use (soft) links. So what I  am looking for would be (soft
>  >        or hard) links for some regions of a buffer to another.
>
> [...]
>
> There is no way to have *some* of the text of one buffer shared with
> another one.  It would be possible to emulate this via a feature
> called indirect buffers (which share the text of the parent direct
> buffer) and invisible text but this has not been done AFAIK.

Many years ago I experimented with a feature that I called indirect
extents. Text is not really shared as in "using the same bits in
memory", but copied back and forth.

See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.xemacs.design/1077

Eventually I gave up for two reasons:

1. I lost interest in literate programming, which was my target
   application for this.

2. Synchronizing the undo lists in each buffer drove me nuts!

You can have the code if you are interested.

Regards
Marcus