Hi Stefan, I agree with what David has to say; I too believe that there are a lot more users expecting the minibuffer prompt to be intangible. For now, I need to add the below to my emacs config (as I don't set the customize variables using the GUI approach, and I would like to simply append stuff to whatever the default value is): (let (;; (get ..) -> ((quote (read-only t face minibuffer-prompt))) ;; (car (get ..)) -> (quote (read-only t face minibuffer-prompt)) ;; (cdr (car (get ..))) -> ((read-only t face minibuffer-prompt)) ;; (car (cdr (car (get ..)))) -> (read-only t face minibuffer-prompt) (default (car (cdr (car (get 'minibuffer-prompt-properties 'standard-value))))) (dont-touch-prompt-prop '(cursor-intangible t))) ;; When `cursor-intangible' property is detected in `minibuffer-prompt-properties', ;; `cursor-intangible-mode' is automatically added to `minibuffer-setup-hook' ;; (see cus-start.el). (custom-set-variables '(minibuffer-prompt-properties (append default dont-touch-prompt-prop) nil nil "Make the minibuffer prompt intangible."))) It is helpful that the minibuffer-setup-hook is updated automatically. But I would also vote for '(cursor-intangible t) to be part of the default value of minibuffer-prompt-properties. That way majority of the users would see the minibuffer prompt behaving as they expect.