Thanks for the distinction and clarification. By thw way, I've just find that such issue occurs only with GUI Emacs! With Emacs running within a terminal (Konsole) everything works as expected, i.e. without any command-line arguments (oher than -nw) the prompt is transferred to the minibuffer.

On 25/12/20 21:59, João Távora wrote:
I'm not 100% sure I follow, but just to underline what I said before: if the system behaves as expected with -Q but not with
lowercase -q then that clearly points to the system-wide shared site-start.el file, not the user's init file.

That's because '-q' inhibits the latter, but not the former.

João

On Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 21:46 Pedro J. V. Mendes <pedro.mendes@ist.utl.pt> wrote:

In my system, only with―from man emacs―“
             -Q, --quick
                      Similar  to  "-q --no-site-file --no-splash".  Also, avoid processing X re‐
                      sources.
” is the prompt transferred to the minibuffer.

I'll check and tweak the startup configuration.

Thanks!

On 25/12/20 21:29, João Távora wrote:
When I studied at that university, shared machines were a thing. I didn't know if they are still, but I'd also try with:

emacs -q # that's lowercase q

If the problem still happens, it's likely in the site-start.el , and not in .emacs


João

On Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 20:46 Daniel Martín via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
"Pedro J. V. Mendes" via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army
knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> OK, (only) after starting with emacs -Q does the password prompt (and
> the focus) appear at the mini-buffer.
>

Yes, that is expected.  The minibuffer prompt should hide your password
with asterisks as you type it.

I think this may not be a bug in Emacs, but a problem somewhere in your
Emacs configuration.  Comment out parts of your .emacs until you find
the culprit.