Re: More visible mini-buffer prompt face

[Mathias Dahl]

> I wonder if it would not be better to have a more visible face for
> the minibuffer prompt by default. My suggestion would be using a
> visible background color (some not too sharp yellow perhaps).

I think that I understand the reason for you wanting this; I
sometimes miss the prompt at first, for example the prompt that is
displayed when trying to update a buffer who's file has been updated
on disk. I think that there are a couple of other situations as well,
but I don't remember any right now.

I think the biggest problem here is that we use the same prompt for
so many different things. In most cases (one can hope), the prompt is
expected as a result of the user executing a certain command (M-x, C-s
or whatever). In some cases it is not expected.

But! This differs from person to person! Let's say I am a new user
that never use isearch; instead I use the Edit -> Search -> String
Forward command. If I accidently hit C-s (maybe I missed a key when
doing C-a) I might not be expecting the prompt.  The question is;
would this situation be "important" enough to justify a more visible
prompt? I think this is *the* problem, all user expects different
things because they use the program in differen ways and with
different experience.

What we can, and should do, in my opinion, is make sure that nothing
"bad" happens if the user at first does not see the prompt, if he just
keeps tpying away. There might be cases like that (I haven't though
about it), and we might want to try and fix those to work better.

About prompts in general:

I happen to agree with the ideas of the late Jef Raskin, when it
comes to prompting the user. Especially in the Yes/No scenario. If you
display this kind of prompt too much, the user will form a habit of
always answering Yes (I think that the most common case).  What
happens next is that there is this Yes/No prompt, to which the user
wants to answer No, if he had stopped for a moment and thought about
it, but instead he chose Yes, because he has formed a habit of doing
so.

When this happens, the prompt has more or less lost its meaning. The
alternative to doing this is to not prompt, and instead display a
non-intrusive, but visible, informational message, about what just
happened, and provide good Undo functionality so that the user can
revert the (potentially) destructive operation. In a perfect world
this would be possible to have Undo for everything, but today there
are some situations where this isn't practically possible, so I guess
we have to live with these prompts and dialog boxes for a while...

My 0.2 kroner.