bug#43572: Feature request: make it possible to choose whether the first lines of the minibuffer should be displayed instead of the last ones

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: ghe@sdf.org,  43572@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 12:44:56 -0400
> 
> > where [...] denotes the portion of text indicated as "important
> > chunk", and | denotes the position of point.  Suppose further than the
> > available screen estate is insufficient to display all of the
> > "important chunk" -- which part would you want to see on display: the
> > part before point? after point? centered at point? something else?
> 
> I think either of those would be fine, so it should be decided by the
> usual scrolling constraints (i.e. don't scroll if not needed, obey
> scroll-conservatively, ...).
> 
> IOW, by default if scrolling was needed anyway and scroll-conservatively
> is not set, I'd expect "centered at point".

The code which implements automatic scrolling was not written with the
mini-window in mind.  In fact, we would like not to allow any
scrolling at all there.

So perhaps relying on scrolling could be fine in normal windows, it
will most probably do the wrong thing in mini-windows.  And even in
normal windows, it will probably work only by sheer luck, because the
design there cares about the context of point, and that is not
necessarily what you want with "important chunks".