Highlighted text in Emacs minibuffer

Question

I'm trying to display some highlighted text in the Emacs minibuffer. I know it's possible because SLIME does it when displaying argument hints. However, I can't see how it's being accomplished by looking at slime.el. Based on what I'm reading there, the displayed text shouldn't be highlighted (relevant section starts at line 3615).

I've tried

• (message "%s" (propertize "test" 'face 'highlight))
• (overlay-put (make-overlay (point-min) (point-min)) 'before-string (propertize "test" 'face 'highlight))
• (with-current-buffer (window-buffer (minibuffer-window)) (insert (propertize "test" 'face 'highlight)))

That last one seems closest to what I want, but the displayed text appears and disappears sporadically as I move point, and it has to be manually removed later. I've also tested the solution given here, and it doesn't seem to work for me either. The non-working solutions all do the same thing; display the text

  #("test" 0 4 (face highlight))

in the minibuffer.

In case it matters, I'm running Emacs 23.4.1 on Debian Wheezy.

Answer 1

You're victim of testing with M-: which additionally to running the code, displays the returned value in the minibuffer, thus immediately overwriting whatever your code has done.