Subject: Re: bug#25665: 26.0.50; [PATCH] Indicate prefix arg in minibuffer prompt for shell-command

From: Tino Calancha <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 12:05:29 +0900 (JST)

On Thu, 9 Feb 2017, [email-masked] wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 11:53 AM, Tino Calancha <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> The meaning of the prefix argument must be explained in the docstring.
>> That and the manual are the source of documentation, not the prompt.
>
> But it's nice if Emacs gives you a different prompt, so that you can be
> sure you typed in the command correctly.
Confirmation for having typed C-u?
Well, sometimes some keys in old keyboards die... ;-)

> Just like M-& gives a
> different prompt from M-!, even though you could figure out the
> different meaning just by reading the docstring of each command.
These are different commands so its Emacs (and whatever editor)
convention to how a different prompt.  The OP suggests to use
a different prompt for the same command w/ or w/o prefix.

There are lots of commands in Emacs accepting a raw,
numeric prefix etc.  If we change M-! prompt, we might
also want to tune the prompt for all of them.  Do we want that?