Re: Feature branches review please

[Gregory Heytings]

Hi Ergus,

> The icomplete-vertical feature branch is pretty much ready, please if 
> any maintainer could give it a last review and tell me anything else 
> needed to merge into master?
You may have followed the (heated) discussions about displaying completion 
candidates vertically in the minibuffer about a month ago.  Short summary:
1. During these discussions, Eli added two lines in xdisp.c, and 
icomplete-vertical now only requires `(setq icomplete-separator "\n")'.
2. These two lines do not implement a 100% correct icomplete-vertical, 
sometimes the prompt is still hidden (in cases where it could/should be 
displayed).  But the approach you use (calculating the height of the 
minibuffer contents pixelwise) is not 100% correct either.
3. The only correct approach is to ask redisplay to start displaying the 
minibuffer at beginning of buffer.  I provided a simple solution to do 
this, but Eli doesn't like it.  He thinks another solution (using text 
properties) should be implemented.  Stefan thinks yet another solution 
(using the buffer redisplay routines instead of using a specific code for 
minibuffers) should be used.  In short, there is no clear agreement.
4. FWIW, I (and a few others) have been using the solution I provided, and 
it works flawlessly.
Gregory