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

[Stefan Monnier]

>> 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.

When the window is big enough to show the whole content, I agree, but as
soon as the buffer is bigger then we need to handle scrolling, just
like elsewhere.

> So perhaps relying on scrolling could be fine in normal windows, it
> will most probably do the wrong thing in mini-windows.

That's not my experience so far.  I do find that the
`scroll-conservatively` is generally desired for the mini-window
(whereas I don't generally like it in normal windows), but other than
that I find (much to my surprise) that the generic scrolling code
behaves just as well as the ad-hoc scrolling code in resize_mini_window.

Thinking about it, maybe I shouldn't be surprised: the generic code is
used much more often and has been tuned quite heavily over the years to
provide good behavior is the vast majority of cases, so it's only
"normal" that it should behave nicely in this case as well.


        Stefan