Re: minibuffer vs dialog-boxes

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
> > Some days ago I proposed changing the background color of the whole
> > minibuffer. Minibuffer-prompt-face is not enough I think. Prompt can be
> > short (like I-search:) and thus it is not enough to get user' attention.
> 
> Note the ``ingenious'' part: we could do something with the face that
> it will draw the attention immediately.

I think the problem is that you have to do it without making the
minibuffer prompt so annoying that it's unpleasant to use -- and I
suspect it may be hard to draw attention to a small string at the bottom
of the screen _without_ being annoying.

Doing something like drawing a bold box around the whole minibuffer
window, on the other hand, would be much more noticable, because (1) it
would cover a much wider area, typically, and (2) because the change
wouldn't be part of the minibuffer text, you could use a more noticable
effect without drawing attention away from the user's entered text
(which, remember, was a problem with using things like `bold' for the
minibuffer prompt face).

-Miles
-- 
I have seen the enemy, and he is us.  -- Pogo