What's with all the hostility? =/
Granted, I might have misread the OP's intentions (even though you guys completely misread mine) but I still think it's rather redundant to have several lines of text jarring your view at the bottom (which currently does take up screen real estate) when a simple keypress solves all problems.
I don't know about you, but a huge number of announcements are entirely ignorable:
"Dwarf X cancels job: item misplaced or destroyed"
And even if you created specific window space just for announcements, what's going to happen when there aren't any? A big empty space? Space with words that you don't really want to be distracted by?
code:
-------------------------
x
x
x
Actual game space
x
x
-------------------------
text
text
text
text
text
text
text
text
-------------------------
Like that? Then what about the people who prefer to use smaller windows to multitask while playing? They don't want to have to have that extra 300 pixels taking up space.
If Toady wants to implement this to get $100, well, there's no problem. Just that there has to be a way to either disable it or go back the way it was for the minimalist and the ones who don't care about every minutae of their dwarves' lives.
EDIT: oh, and Draco. There's a difference between "scrolling" and "scrollable". The OP wanted a SCROLLABLE message bar at the bottom, to which I responded: "Why would you want to SCROLL THROUGH messages when you can just press "a"?" Read it up.
[ January 31, 2008: Message edited by: umiman ]