thoughts on status messages

[Mike Frysinger]

this thread is more about starting a discussion on a better UX rather
than having an answer/patch myself :).

i rarely notice or see messages shown in the status bar, especially when
i open multiple files at once.  at some points in the past, nano would
sometimes pause when showing "important" messages which was even worse.
there was "nopause" to mitigate it before becoming the default.

when you have constantshow enabled, moving the cursor at all will clear
those messages.  and there's no way to bring them back.  so if nano did
show something that happened to catch my eye but i started editing too
fast, it'd be gone forever.

random ideas:
* a "console" that would hold all messages shown in the current buffer.
  it'd be like opening a read-only file, so the user could move their
  cursor around and search and copy and such.  it can be switched to
  like the help pane via a keyboard shortcut.  to make it discoverable,
  add an aside when messages are shown like "(^P to view log)".  (and
  change ^P to whatever shortcut is used/active.)
* messages would stack up & disappear automatically at the bottom of the
  screen rather than being a single line shared with the constantshow.
* turn the "Modified" space in the upper right into more of a flag space
  for multiple states.  M for modified, R for read-only, LF/CRLF for the
  line ending mode, etc...  maybe see what other editors use as the short
  names in their status bars (e.g. what does vim or vscode use?).
-mike