(Emacs) Text is read only?

Question

So I was working in emacs and the suddenly, the slime-repl sbcl says text is read only. Well that\'s great because now I can\'t type anything into it. How do I fix?

Answer 1

I can't offer any insight into why you ended up with undesirable read-only text properties, but I occasionally encounter similar situations and so find the following command useful.

Select the region in question (or C-xh for the entire buffer), and run M-x set-region-writeable to remove the read-only text properties.

(defun set-region-writeable (begin end)
  "Removes the read-only text property from the marked region."
  ;; See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7410125
  (interactive "r")
  (let ((modified (buffer-modified-p))
        (inhibit-read-only t))
    (remove-text-properties begin end '(read-only t))
    (set-buffer-modified-p modified)))