Why setting the command window height to 2 lines, avoid many cases of having to "press <Enter> to continue"?

Question

I found this on my .vimrc:

Set the command window height to 2 lines, to avoid many cases of having to
" "press <Enter> to continue"
set cmdheight=2

And this causes this extra space at the bottom of the page:

And if I set it to set cmdheight=1, then I got a smaller space:

I do not understand I need to set cmdheight=2. What are these many cases of having to "press <Enter> to continue"?

It seems nice to not have to keep pressing enter repeatedly (for whatever reason it is), but why I need to lose one (1) line of vertical space in the screen for that?

Answer 1

The press-enter prompt appears if the cmdline area is not big enough to display a text.

E.g. a plugin prints more lines then what 'cmdheight' is set to. It even happens when cmdheight=1, but the line to be printed is longer than the width of the window.

:set cmdheight=1
:echomsg "foo" | echomsg "bar"

IMHO, setting 'cmdheight' to 2 or higher is not worth it, because it simply looks ugly and steals space to work around a not too common press-enter prompt.

Rather plugins should take it into account and "flush" their messages via :redraw:

:echomsg "foo" | redraw | echomsg "bar"

Now, you'll only see the latter message, but still find the former one in the message history via :messages.

See :h press-enter for more information on this.