Improve Emacs usability - newsticker

Improve Emacs usability - newsticker

[Nicola Manca]

Hallo,

First time I write here, so let me start saying thank you for the great 
job your doing with Emacs!

Trying to evolve into an emacs-centered lifestyle, I found out 
newsticker-tree to read RSS feed. I found it pretty comfortable,
in particularly if you are used to liferea or akregator.

However there are some usability improvements that would make it almost 
an out-of-the-box replacement of these graphical softwares. I was not 
sure if this is the right place where to discuss this or if I should 
send a 'feature request' bug report. However, since there are a lot of 
discussions about making life for new users easier, these are 
suggestions that may be valuable.

I'm sorry for the ordering, I just wrote them down what as they came up 
in my mind.

- Import opml does not preserve the tree structure, new groups have to 
be created and populated.

- Feeds arrangement needs to be save continuously by pressing 's', this 
is total counter-intuitive and, even if I was aware of it, many times I 
did save and found out my feeds spread around, again.

- I cannot sort groups as I do with feeds (M-<up/down>)

- There is no easy way to remove feeds as to insert them, that's totally 
absurd from my point of view.

- Focus does not follow the cursor, this is quite uncomfortable when you 
want to operate on a feed you have the cursor on, but the highlighted 
one is another.

- Some operations are incredibly slow, marking 'old' a feed with ~100 
items takes several seconds.

- It would be quite handy if the feed's displayed name would correspond 
to the label assigned, some feeds have an incredibly long name that 
doesn't fit the right window (if you keep it at a reasonably width).

- Even if i disabled the visualization of icons next to a feed name, 
those who were already downloaded remained there.

These are the small usability issues I found so far. They may seems 
minor but in my experience are those small stuff may be quite relevant 
for new users.

cheers,
Nicola Manca

Re: Improve Emacs usability - newsticker

[Nicola Manca]

On 14/05/20 12:25, Nicola Manca wrote:
> Hallo,
> 
> First time I write here, so let me start saying thank you for the great 
> job your doing with Emacs!
> 
> Trying to evolve into an emacs-centered lifestyle, I found out 
> newsticker-tree to read RSS feed. I found it pretty comfortable,
> in particularly if you are used to liferea or akregator.
> 
> However there are some usability improvements that would make it almost 
> an out-of-the-box replacement of these graphical softwares. I was not 
> sure if this is the right place where to discuss this or if I should 
> send a 'feature request' bug report. However, since there are a lot of 
> discussions about making life for new users easier, these are 
> suggestions that may be valuable.
> 
> I'm sorry for the ordering, I just wrote them down what as they came up 
> in my mind.
> 
> - Import opml does not preserve the tree structure, new groups have to 
> be created and populated.
> 
> - Feeds arrangement needs to be save continuously by pressing 's', this 
> is total counter-intuitive and, even if I was aware of it, many times I 
> did save and found out my feeds spread around, again.
> 
> - I cannot sort groups as I do with feeds (M-<up/down>)
> 
> - There is no easy way to remove feeds as to insert them, that's totally 
> absurd from my point of view.
> 
> - Focus does not follow the cursor, this is quite uncomfortable when you 
> want to operate on a feed you have the cursor on, but the highlighted 
> one is another.
> 
> - Some operations are incredibly slow, marking 'old' a feed with ~100 
> items takes several seconds.
> 
> - It would be quite handy if the feed's displayed name would correspond 
> to the label assigned, some feeds have an incredibly long name that 
> doesn't fit the right window (if you keep it at a reasonably width).
> 
> - Even if i disabled the visualization of icons next to a feed name, 
> those who were already downloaded remained there.
> 
> These are the small usability issues I found so far. They may seems 
> minor but in my experience are those small stuff may be quite relevant 
> for new users.
> 
> cheers,
> Nicola Manca

Forgot to mention, I'm using GNU Emacs 28.0.50, built with:
--with-nativecomp --with-imagemagick --with-xwidgets --with-x

cheers,
Nicola