>>>>> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> That sounds interesting. What if the command ends with "!" alone? Should it
> be synchronous and silent? (I guess not.)

That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, does it...

> John, would you like me to explore this idea further and try to come up with
> a patch? Are there any other ideas for the UI?

I'm not sure about changing these functions in core Emacs. I can think of
still other behaviors (like not showing the async output buffer until there is
output to display). Rather than changing these venerable commands, it might be
better to explore the UI possibilities in an add-on (using advice, maybe?) for
the time being.

Or maybe the concept the "execute but hide the buffer" should just be a new
command, provided by an ELPA package that offers more options related to
executing shell commands from the minibuffer?

> Also, I'm pretty sure that the current meaning of the prefix argument for
> `async-shell-command' /must/ be documented - it is far from obvious, and can
> be learned only from careful reading of the code. I'm going to prepare such
> a patch for docs (both the docstring and the manual) first.

Yes, it should definitely be documented.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2