Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> I was just mentioning that vs Drew's "in emacs the mini buffer *can* be in
>> a frame". Because *that* requires a lot of manually installing packages that
>> he refers to here:
>>
>> https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/OneOnOneEmacs
>
> FWIW, to get started, you just need:
>
>     emacs -Q --eval "(setq default-frame-alist '((minibuffer . nil)))"
>
> But this indeed just begs the question of how to *manage* that
> minibuffer-only frame (i.e. make it so that it's easily accessible when
> the user needs it but it doesn't constantly get in the way the rest of
> the time).
>
> I don't know of any package/theme/thingy that provides a good solution
> to that yet.  I think such a thing could be very useful&popular, so I'd
> encourage you (or whoever else) to take a stab at it.
>
>
>         Stefan
"autohide" (similar as windows taskbar) could be a way? But it is
hardcoded in c-code that minibuffer can not be hidden.

What I learned some decades ago when I took my driving license is that
human eye is trained to register motion, better then static objects. So
if minibuffer poped/raised/lowered (like a quake console :-)) when
needed, that motion could draw attention more then just some text
prompting in a tatic minibuffer. Same effect is probably achieved by
flushing minibuffers background/foreground colors or similar.