Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Text Marks

A mark is a symbolic name for a position between two characters. Marks have the property that when text is inserted or deleted they retain their logical position, not their numerical index position. Marks are persistent: If you delete the text surrounding a mark, it remains intact. Marks are created with the mark set operation and must be explicitly deleted with the mark unset operation. Once defined, a mark can be used in operations that require indices. The following commands define a mark at the beginning of the word containing the insert cursor and delete from there up to the end of the line:

$t mark set foobar "insert wordstart"
$t delete foobar "foobar lineend"
$t mark unset foobar

When a mark is defined, it is set to be just ...