Is it possible to create Evaluatable cell which will be automatically overwritten?

Question

Am trying to generate an Evaluatable cell which itself is an output cell which will be overwritten when the original Input cell will be evaluated again:

CellPrint[
 ExpressionCell[Defer[1 + 1], "Output", Evaluatable -> True, 
  CellAutoOverwrite -> True, GeneratedCell -> True]]

Without Evaluatable -> True everything works as expected: the generated output cell is automatically overwritten when the input cell is evaluated again. But adding Evaluatable -> True breaks this behavior.

Is it possible to generate Evaluatable cell which will be automatically overwritten?

Answer 1

This will do what you want, without having to resort to SelectionMove or something silly like that. Of course, it does not use CellAutoOverwrite, so possibly this is not the "yes" you would have hoped for. The same can probably be achieved using CellID, but I'm not sure how that works.

NotebookDelete[Cells[CellTags -> "@#$kill me"]]
CellPrint[
  ExpressionCell[Defer[1 + 1], "Output", GeneratedCell -> True, 
   Evaluatable -> True, CellTags -> "@#$kill me" ]];

Edit: I misread a comment by you on an answer to your other question. I suppose you don't want to automatically evaluate the printed Cell after all, correct?

Answer 2

This behavior does appear to be directly tied to the Evaluatable option as I will show.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution. I offer these observations:

With the code in the question:

ExpressionCell[Defer[1 + 1], "Output",
  CellAutoOverwrite -> True,
  GeneratedCell -> True
] // CellPrint

The generated cell is overwritten, and you can still evaluate the output cell by placing the cursor within it and using Shift+Enter. It is converted to an Input cell, but an "Output" cell is converted to Input even if the option Evaluatable -> True is used.

With style "Input" the generated cell is not overwritten:

ExpressionCell[Defer[1 + 1], "Input",
  CellAutoOverwrite -> True,
  GeneratedCell -> True
] // CellPrint

But it is overwritten if we add Evaluatable -> False:

ExpressionCell[Defer[1 + 1], "Input",
  CellAutoOverwrite -> True,
  GeneratedCell -> True,
  Evaluatable -> False
] // CellPrint