Reading Text Strings with the Minibuffer

Most often, the minibuffer is used to read text as a string. It can also be used to read a Lisp object in textual form. The most basic primitive for minibuffer input is read-from-minibuffer; it can do either one.

In most cases, you should not call minibuffer input functions in the middle of a Lisp function. Instead, do all minibuffer input as part of reading the arguments for a command, in the interactive spec. See section Defining Commands.

Function: read-from-minibuffer prompt-string &optional initial-contents keymap read hist

This function is the most general way to get input through the minibuffer. By default, it accepts arbitrary text and returns it as a string; however, if read is non-nil, then it uses read to convert the text into a Lisp object (see section Input Functions).

The first thing this function does is to activate a minibuffer and display it with prompt-string as the prompt. This value must be a string.

Then, if initial-contents is a string, read-from-minibuffer inserts it into the minibuffer, leaving point at the end. The minibuffer appears with this text as its contents.

The value of initial-contents may also be a cons cell of the form (string . position). This means to insert string in the minibuffer but put point position characters from the beginning, rather than at the end.

If keymap is non-nil, that keymap is the local keymap to use in the minibuffer. If keymap is omitted or nil, the value of minibuffer-local-map is used as the keymap. Specifying a keymap is the most important way to customize the minibuffer for various applications such as completion.

The argument hist specifies which history list variable to use for saving the input and for history commands used in the minibuffer. It defaults to minibuffer-history. See section Minibuffer History.

When the user types a command to exit the minibuffer, read-from-minibuffer uses the text in the minibuffer to produce its return value. Normally it simply makes a string containing that text. However, if read is non-nil, read-from-minibuffer reads the text and returns the resulting Lisp object, unevaluated. (See section Input Functions, for information about reading.)

Function: read-string prompt &optional initial

This function reads a string from the minibuffer and returns it. The arguments prompt and initial are used as in read-from-minibuffer. The keymap used is minibuffer-local-map.

This is a simplified interface to the read-from-minibuffer function:

(read-string prompt initial)
==
(read-from-minibuffer prompt initial nil nil nil)

Variable: minibuffer-local-map

This is the default local keymap for reading from the minibuffer. By default, it makes the following bindings:

LFD

exit-minibuffer

RET

exit-minibuffer

C-g

abort-recursive-edit

M-n

next-history-element

M-p

previous-history-element

M-r

next-matching-history-element

M-s

previous-matching-history-element

Function: read-no-blanks-input prompt &optional initial

This function reads a string from the minibuffer, but does not allow whitespace characters as part of the input: instead, those characters terminate the input. The arguments prompt and initial are used as in read-from-minibuffer.

This is a simplified interface to the read-from-minibuffer function, and passes the value of the minibuffer-local-ns-map keymap as the keymap argument for that function. Since the keymap minibuffer-local-ns-map does not rebind C-q, it is possible to put a space into the string, by quoting it.

(read-no-blanks-input prompt initial)
==
(read-from-minibuffer prompt initial minibuffer-local-ns-map)

Variable: minibuffer-local-ns-map

This built-in variable is the keymap used as the minibuffer local keymap in the function read-no-blanks-input. By default, it makes the following bindings, in addition to those of minibuffer-local-map:

SPC

exit-minibuffer

TAB

exit-minibuffer

?

self-insert-and-exit

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