Subject: Re: bug#48134: When sitting on top of a M-x item in the manual

From: Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2021 18:09:32 +0200

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> This is how Emacs works all over the place -- `M-n' should get you the
> suggestion.  Making all prompts tell you about this standard feature
> would be less than optimal, so I don't think there's anything to fix
> here, and I'm closing this bug report.

FWIW, I think I only ever found out about M-n because someone sang its
praise somewhere on the Net.  I see that (info "(emacs) Minibuffer
History") mentions its DWIM behaviour and gives examples for filename
prompts, but given how ubiquitous and useful M-n is, I wonder if we
couldn't do more to advertise it.

Emacs does tell users about (some) standard features, e.g. after C-h f,
we get a message advertising "q" and "C-M-v".  I get that longtime users
mostly see that as noise, but I think messaging a concise hint along the
lines of "N suggestions; select them with M-n" would make this "future
history" easier to discover.

I realize that this would probably not be trivial to implement though.
Looking up "future history in minibuffer input" in the Elisp manual
brought me to (info "(elisp) Text from Minibuffer"), which lured me into
thinking that this hypothetical hint could simply be added in
read-from-minibuffer, by looking at the DEFAULT argument; a stroll
through read-extended-command taught me that some functions compute
their "future history" dynamically with minibuffer-default-add-function,
which I guess complicates things a bit?

(… Alternatively, read-extended-command could just default to the
command at point, like describe-{function,variable,symbol} do)