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

[Gregory Heytings]

> > This seems to be a really minor problem.  What kind of problems could 
> > happen because during a recursive edit while icomplete or ido or ... is 
> > active, redisplay is asked to start displaying at BOB?  Do you really 
> > believe this could lead to a non-minor problem?
>
> Yes.  There are third-party packages out there that do unimaginable 
> things when the user is prompted to enter his/her choice of something.
>
> And in any case, we don't want to rely on luck in these matters, IME the 
> Murphy laws are very strong here.

I can't believe this, in particular given that the default value of 
enable-recursive-minibuffers is nil.  And in any case I'd say that it's to 
the third-party packages to adapt to changes in Emacs (and I'm sure from 
time to time there are changes here and there that force them to adapt 
their code).

> > Then I wonder why this did not happen earlier (and wonder when it will 
> > happen).  A bug report about this exact problem has already been filed 
> > five years ago (bug#24293).  Five years ago.  And the patch I'm 
> > proposing is less than ten lines long, and would be most welcome today.
>
> It didn't happen for the usual reasons: no one felt motivated enough to 
> sit down and do it.
>
> Can I convince you to try implementing this via text properties?

Of course you can.  But only if you promise you will not reject what I do.

> The code will be very simple, I promise.

In fact, that's not motivating ;-)

> And we are here to help if you are unsure how to go about that.

Thank you, that's good to know.