RE: Use of minibuffer-prompt face when minibuffer is not involved

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > 0. Do nothing. ("The face might be called minibuffer-prompt, but there
> >    are enough non-minibuffer uses of it that it's not worth fixing
> >    this inconsistency at this point.")
> 
> That's what I vote for.
> 
> More to the point, I think the difference between minibuffer prompts and
> non-minibuffer prompts should be a purely internal one.  After all, you
> could rewrite yes-or-no-p so as not to use a minibuffer or rewrite
> y-or-n-p to make it use a minibuffer: should that have as a side-effect
> to use a different face, really?

It's not about y-or-n-p or yes-or-no-p.  That's the
wrong way to look at it.  Yes-or-no-p is not at all
representative of minibuffer prompting for input.

`minibuffer-prompt' face should be a clear indicator
to users that the minibuffer is active.

Prompting for non-minibuffer input should either not
have a face or should use a different face.

(Users can of course themselves define that face to
look the same as `minibuffer-prompt' if they really
want such "consistency", but Emacs itself should not
force-confuse/identify the two.)

> >     - dired-do-shell-command's warning about "wildcard" characters
> >       annoys me, since AFAICT they may not be wildcards at all
> >       (e.g. they may be quoted or backslash-escaped).
> >
> >     - Rather than coming up with a better warning, I toyed with text
> >       properties to build a prompt which highlights these characters.
> >
> >     - I found out that y-or-n-p discards my prompt's text properties.
> 
> So the problem is not the use of minibuffer-prompt but the fact that it
> overrides other faces while applying it.  That should be easy to fix by
> using `add-face-text-property` instead of `propertize`.

No.  That is not "the problem".  That is something
altogether different.

The "problem" reported for `dired-do-shell-command'
has _nothing_ to do with the question of whether
non-minibuffer prompting should use a face and, if
so, which face.

This emacs-dev thread should _drop_ the question of
`dired-do-shell-command' and whether or how its
prompting should best be worded or highlighted or
whatever.

It was a _mistake_ for the bug thread to ever have
confounded the two discussions - and even to confound
a third, also unrelated. discussion about allowing
text properties for `help-echo' tooltips.

The question raised for emacs-devel by this thread
is whether non-minbuffer prompting should have a
face, and if so, which face.