Re: Change stars as read-hide-char

[Robert Pluim]

Colin Baxter <address@hidden> writes:

>     > Hmm. Could you show a full transcript of what youʼre doing? Donʼt
>     > forget that the let-binding is only valid within the let, not for
>     > the entire session. If you want it to valid all the time you'll
>     > need to do
>
>     > (setq read-hide-char ?.)
>
> Ok, that explains things I think. At the beginning, I wanted to set `.'
> as the read-hide-char in my emacs-init file, but the doc string for
> read-hide-char says it should never be set globally. I took that to mean
> never to set via a `setq'. This seemed to be confirmed in comments of
> the lisp/subr.el file, where using a let-bind is suggested. Hence my
> efforts at writing a `let' to my emacs-init, which maybe were a little
> naive.
>
> The (setq read-hide-char ?.) does indeed work, and seems to do so
> without creating errors elsewhere. So I'll leave it in my ~/.emacs for
> now. However, I am now curious as to what the sentence, `This variable
> should never be set globally.' means in the doc-string for
> `read-hide-char'. Perhaps the doc-string could be amplified slightly?

I suspect there are situations where having read-hide-char set causes
things to be hidden that shouldn't be, hence it should only be set
temporarily. Maybe someone on the list here knows.

Robert