bug#81662: 31.1; [FR] Registers pointing to bookmarks

On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 9:18 AM Stefan Monnier via Bug reports for GNU
Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors <[email protected]> wrote:

> > I propose to support bookmarks as register content. This way register
> > keys can be used as quick access keys to bookmarks. Bookmarks are
> > supported by many major modes. The feature can be implemented easily
> > since register.el uses generic methods:
>
> As I mentioned recently elsewhere, I think it would be good to
> consolidate the two (as well as the `revert-buffer-function` and the
> help-xref state), so I think it's a step in the right direction.
>
> > (cl-defmethod register-val-describe ((bm (head bookmark)) _verbose)
> >   (princ (format "Bookmark \"%s\"" (cdr bm))))
>
> Ah, so you'd use `(bookmark . NAME)` as representation?
> I was expecting we'd use the actual "bookmark record" rather than use an
> indirection through `bookmark-alist`.  Now that I see this option, I'm
> not sure which is best.
>

One downside to using a bookmark name is that bookmark-rename and
bookmark-delete won't know about a register's name reference, now stale.
In the bufferlo package, we've taken some care with both to warn about
potential conflicts and propagate changes in bufferlo bookmark structures.
This could be cleaner.