emacs table-mode: why does a kill-ring-save on a (single) cell mark the (entire) buffer as “changed”?

That “feature” (marking the buffer as changed) is terribly annoying!!! You try to copy (AKA kill-ring-save) text from a table, and from now on something “tells” you, you “changed” the table – but actually you did not. You may be tempted to think, saving a file is a cheap operation, but what if the file is actually located on a remote machine and you are operating on the file through tramp and you cannot reach the machine for a couple of hours?!!

Why not change the buffer to read-only and kill-ring-save than? if you try to kill-ring-save in read-only mode, emacs shouts at you:

apply: Buffer is read-only: #<buffer …>

But yes, although emacs shouted at you, you succeeded copying the text in question to the kill-ring, and now you can paste it into wherever you want.


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