I got it. Thanks for your explaination. It is strange that minibuffer-message-timeout is defined in C. But the timeout is processed in lisp (in the function minibuffer-message). 在 2019年11月8日 +0800 AM6:58,Juri Linkov ,写道: The prompt is replaced with the message from autorevert. And after about 2~3 seconds (not fixed), the prompt comes back. What controls the delay(2~3 seconds)? It is not the value of minibuffer-message-timeout, which is 0.6. Is this expected? The problem is that when auto-revert-handler calls minibuffer-message, the current buffer is not the minibuffer, because functions that call auto-revert-handler (auto-revert-notify-handler, auto-revert--end-lockout, or auto-revert-buffers) change the current buffer using with-current-buffer. When the current buffer is not the minibuffer then minibuffer-message just calls (message "%s" message) and then does (sit-for (or minibuffer-message-timeout 1000000)) And it behaves differently with the following test code: (progn (run-with-idle-timer 3 nil (lambda () (minibuffer-message "Reverting buffer `%s'." (buffer-name)))) (call-interactively 'find-file)) This works well. The prompt is NOT replaced. The message is appended to the end of the prompt and disappears after 0.6 second. To work well like this, minibuffer-message should be called outside of with-current-buffer code block. Yesterday I fixed Man-bgproc-sentinel in bug#19064 to call minibuffer-message outside of with-current-buffer. But auto-revert functions require complete rewrite. I don't see how this could be fixed with a simple change.