Subject: Re: bug#8050: Gnus does not connect to my IMAP server any more

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:04:17 -0500

SM> And that leads to an absence of cursor in the minibuffer, even though
SM> it's fundamentally a prompt.  Why not copy y-or-n-p from subr.el as
SM> a starting point?
SM> If you can factor out the commonality, I'd be happy to provide
SM> a "prompt-maker" function and then define y-or-n-p in terms of that
SM> prompt-maker.

> Can I really be the only one to need this?  Weird.  I actually used
> `read-char-choice' first but XEmacs doesn't support it.  Perhaps Gnus
> should provide a compatibility wrapper that uses it opportunistically.
> Would you rather go the "prompt-maker" route?

Oh, I didn't even remember read-char-choice, but yes, that's probably
a better starting point.  We should actually make y-or-n-p use
read-char-choice.

> I really like the way dropdown-list.el does selection (see
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/dropdown-list.el, "overlays stolen
> from company-mode.el").  It shows the list of choices inside the buffer
> as a true popup.  To me that looks much better than y-or-n-p if the
> terminal supports it.  If Emacs doesn't have anything similar, I think
> it's a nice addition to the core UI functionality.  Let me know and I'll
> propose it on emacs-devel if necessary.

I don't know what that would look like in your y/n/N/e/? case.

        Stefan