Subject: Re: bug#35564: [PATCH v5] Tweak dired warning about "wildcard" characters

From: Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 23:11:08 +0200

Juri Linkov <[email-masked]> writes:

> 1. Why there is the verbose option “toggle [D]etails”
>    while just “[?]” should be enough.  For example, like
>    in query-replace typing ‘?’ displays the Help window,
>    just typing ‘?’ here could display the Dired Help.

'?' is an automatic option added by read-multiple-choice.  It pops-up an
autogenerated buffer repeating the prompt and showing longer
descriptions for each option.

I would have liked '?' to show what I ended up putting in the "details"
buffer; ideally read-multiple-choice would have an optional HELP-MESSAGE
argument that could be squeezed between the prompt and the key
description when showing the help buffer.

Since that's not how things work, I went for the additional option
('d').

> 2. Would it be possible to customize the prompt to accept
>    short answers “y, n” instead of long answers “Yes, No”?
>    When ‘read-answer-short’ is ‘auto’ by default,
>    the behaviour of ‘read-answer’ depends on whether
>    `yes-or-no-p' is set to `y-or-n-p'.  In this case
>    ‘read-answer’ accepts short single-key answers.

I didn't know about read-answer, that was an interesting discovery.

read-multiple-choice only accepts single-key answers, you cannot answer
with long options if I'm not mistaken.  You cannot choose what the
prompt looks like either; you simply provide a list of (KEY NAME
[DESCRIPTION]) tuples; NAMEs will be shown in the prompt, DESCRIPTIONs
will be shown in the auto-generated help buffer.

(Let me know if that does not answer your question; I might have
misunderstood.)