Subject: bug#34939: Some minibuffer behaviour is annoying

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2019 18:57:12 +0200

On 21.03.2019 21:13, pinkanon pinkanon wrote:
> Hi! I have two issues regarding minibuffer usage:
> 
> (1) when I press backspace and the prompt is empty, minibuffer tells me
> "Text is read-only". You. Don't. Say.

Agreed.

> Proposed solution: while it can be argued that this is an OK default,
> it would be great to have an option to show nothing instead.

As a "solution", patch would be better.

Off the top of my head, I don't see a simple fix while the prompt is 
still implemented using the read-only text property.

> (2) When I try to quit and some buffer is unchanged, I get the usual
> deal asking me what I want. The problem I have here [in addition to
> the problem discussed in (1), adapted to this case: "Type C-h for
> help."] is that I must use C-g, but not good old escape.
> 
> Proposed solution: make [an option to be able to] ESC any minibuffer
> prompt. In this particular case, maybe ESC could be added to one of
> the possible response options, but that's an implementation detail as
> far as I am concerned, a regular user.
> 
> Here are some other people trying to solve this problem with no luck.
> https://superuser.com/questions/795763/how-to-make-emacs-quit-the-minibuffer-with-one-press-of-esc

Probably no simple way to make ESC work that way. The answer gives a 
hint why. But you could go the ergoemacs way, I guess.