Richard M. Stallman wrote:
BTW the message "Text is readonly" is also confusing when "Inviolable"
is set.
I do not understand.
You expect the prompt to be readonly and the message is
disturbing when you delete character by character and then suddenly this
text appears over the prompt.
I can't follow.
Would you please give a clear test case, so we can understand
what behavior you are complaining about?
This is not very important, but I did find it very annoying indeed. If
you at a minibuffer prompt just hold down backspace to delete entered
characters (this is quite common behaviour in situations like that) then
Emacs will delete all characters up to the prompt and then show "Text is
read-only".
That message sits there in front of the prompt and you really wonder
what has happened. This is nothing you are used to from other
applications in similar situations. "What could I have done? Did I do
something else than just delete those characters? How can I know?"
Then you discover that the message disappear but you still feel a bit
unsure. After a while you begin to understand (after carefully checking
for changes in the files, shutting down Emacs and starting it again
perhaps). Even when you find the message most annoying because you have
to wait until it disappears - at least you believe that because you have
not yet learned...
----
Making a good UI is of course about carefully thinking about issues like
the one above. What to do is by no means easy to decide. My intention is
just to draw your attention to this and tell my view.
And I am sorry that I was not able to state this short and clear from
the beginning. But it is not easy since I have noticed that issues like
this often get handled on the wrong level. No surprise of course,
thinking is not a small bit about beeing able to simplify. That is good,
I know of no other way, but sometimes you must go back and see what
might have been lost, maybe even changing the strategy a bit.
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