Re: Minibuffer default values list

[Juri Linkov]

>     Below is a first implementation that has one drawback: it uses a new
>     function dired-read-shell-command-default from dired.  I think this
>     function should be generalized and moved to simple.el.
>
> I don't like the idea that all use of M-! will load mailcap.el.

In Dired ! already loads mailcap.el, and it seems this is not a bad thing.

If you don't want loading mailcap.el on M-! then what do you think about
loading mailcap.el only when the user types M-n in the shell command's
minibuffer?  This is possible to implement by creating a new minibuffer
variable e.g. `minibuffer-lazy-default'.  When this variable is non-nil,
then minibuffer functions will load mailcap.el and set the value of
`minibuffer-default' to the list of commands after the user types M-n.

> In addition, it is unmodular since mailcap.el is a part of Gnus.

mailcap.el is located in the gnus directory, but it doesn't depend on Gnus.
It doesn't load Gnus-specific files.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/