Re: Any way to make minibuffer questions more obvious?

[Steven Degutis]

In that case, are there any built-in functions or things that let me create a "pop up" window/frame/anything? Kinda like a windows dialog "Are you sure" box in the sense that it sits on top of everything else centerde in the screen, but still responds to my keys.

-Steven

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> I was in dired, and I deleted a dir using D, then I hit "y"
> to confirm I want to delete it. Next I try to go copy another
> with C, but nothing happens. I look in the minibuffer and it
> says "Please answer y or n.  Kill dired buffer of foo, too?
> (y or n)".
>
> I had no idea it was asking me this second question.  I
> completely forgot that it would. And the minibuffer where it
> asks it is the bottom left of my screen, while the dired
> buffer is in the top-right, this being a 27" Apple display
> at highest possible resolution, so there's no way I would
> have noticed it.
>
> Is there a way to make this kind of question pop-up a new
> frame or some other more visual way of asking this?

I think we've all been bitten by that more than once. ;-)

Dunno whether someone else will have a brilliant suggestion.  (I don't.)

There are ways to make Emacs flash, burp, and wave its arms wildly, and you
could always attach those to (your version of) `y-or-n-p'.  But soon you might
find that annoying.

FWIW, `y-or-n-p' does not use the minibuffer.  It simply reads a user-initiated
event, which is typically hitting a key (e.g. `y' or `n').  If it doesn't like
the event it reads then it asks you again.  and again.