Subject: Re: bug#35564: 27.0.50; [PATCH] Tweak dired-do-shell-command warning about "wildcard" characters

From: martin rudalics <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2019 10:13:06 +0200

> (Perhaps those clients could be migrated to a new face,
 > e.g. 'message-prompt', which would inherit 'minibuffer-prompt' by
 > default?)

Simply 'prompt' would be more intuitive since most messages do not show
prompts.  But I'm afraid we'll have to stick to what we have now.

 > Fair enough.  Should I raise the issue on emacs-devel, or create a new
 > bug report?  Just to make sure I am not omitting something, is this how
 > you would sum up the issue?
 >
 > - In the context of bug#35564, I would like to add text properties to
 >    the y-or-n-p prompt (although I'm open to other, simpler solutions
 >    e.g. simply changing Dired's message).
 >
 > - While this can be patched within y-or-n-p and we can call it a day,
 >    the minibuffer-prompt-face-adding code could be factored out of
 >    'read_minibuf'.
 >
 > - This raises two questions:
 >
 >      1. Do we actually want to use the 'minibuffer-prompt' face in this
 >         context, since the minibuffer is not involved?
 >
 >      2. What do we do with other clients of 'minibuffer-prompt', which
 >         use the same (propertize prompt 'face 'minibuffer-prompt) idiom?

That would sum it up (but since I don't use Dired I can't comment on
that).

Note that this isssue also touches one Drew raised elsewhere - whether
'tooltip-show' should retain face properties of the original text or
show text uniformly with the 'tooltip' face.  Maybe we should
introduce an option like 'prompts-retain-text-properites' so users
have the choice.

 > [1] AFAICT, the commit that added this face (927be33, back when y-or-n-p
 >      was still a C function) does not say why this was thought to be a
 >      good idea.

It's probably part of a concept to have prompts appear uniformly and
integrate them into the framework of themes.  Note that Emacs usually
cannot control the appearance of dialog boxes or system tooltips.

martin