Re: Feature request : Tab-completion for 'shell-comand'

[Juri Linkov]

>     I think that when the minibuffer is active, we should still output
>     a message, only differently (as does minibuffer-message).
>
> I have doubts that this is uniformly the best thing to do.
> I think that the best thing to do depends on the message:
> some messages are good to display at the end of the minibuffer,
> as in `minibuffer-message', and some are better just omitted
> while in the minibuffer.

Currently messages displayed when the minibuffer is active don't get
omitted.  They just obscure the minibuffer content from the user.

> There are some messages that probably should be displayed as now,
> replacing the minibuffer.  For instance, the messages displayed by
> Isearch.  I think that is the best way to display them; I think that
> displaying them at the end, as in `minibuffer-message', would look
> strange.
>
> It is possible that if we try displaying Isearch messages at the end,
> we will like it.  But it seems unlikely.

With the patch I sent (that changes `message' to call `minibuffer-message'
in the active minibuffer), Isearch in the minibuffer works mostly without
changes, but there is a difference on failed Isearch: without this patch
the Isearch error message overwrites the minibuffer content, but with this
patch it appends the error message to the end of the minibuffer, e.g.

I-search backward: foo [Failing I-search backward: bar]

I'm not sure this is a bad thing since it keeps displaying the original
content of the minibuffer.

Otherwise, we could just fix this particular case not to use
`minibuffer-message'.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/