The intangible property is not needed when the text is already invisible. From the Elisp manual: Beware: this property operates at a very low level, and affects a lot of code in unexpected ways. So use it with extreme caution. A common misuse is to put an intangible property on invisible text, which is actually unnecessary since the command loop will move point outside of the invisible text at the end of each command anyway. See Adjusting Point After Commands. For these reasons, this property is obsolete; use the cursor-intangible property instead.