Multi-line messages

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Lars" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi at gnus.org> writes:

    >> It's also possible to resize the minibuffer/echo area window
    >> permanently with enlarge-window.

    Lars> Hm...  that's a possibility.  Although it might be a bit
    Lars> fragile.

Yes, that's why I'm _not_ doing handstands and generally being totally
enthusiastic about the idea.

    Lars> What I'm using this for is to display "electric" completions
    Lars> in the To/Cc headers.  The new ecomplete package tries to be
    Lars> as (un)obtrusive as the completion you get in
    Lars> Firefox/Thunderbird.  The traditional Emacs way of doing
    Lars> this is by popping up new buffers, which I think is too
    Lars> obtrusive for this kind of thing.

    Lars> Tooltips might be a possibility.

But not on TTYs.  I don't know how hard an automatically resizing echo
area would be to implement, but I'll push it on the task stack for
that case alone.

For display-only on GUI, how about using the top gutter?  You can put
a string there just as easily as a tab control (in fact, the way we put
the tab control there is in a bag on a kludge ... ahem, in a glyph on
an extent on an empty string).

Another possibility would be a pop-up menu, but that's rather heavy in
its default form.  A custom dialog would be possible, too, but might
be a lot of work.  (One issue is that getting the pixel geometry
right, especially the positioning, is quite kludgy.)

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