On Wed, 25 May 2011 00:10:43 -0400, Austin Clements <amdragon@mit.edu> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, what use cases do you envision for this?  So far
> I've only heard two, both of which seem like great ideas, but neither
> of which require such a heavy-handed solution: displaying unread
> counts for tags rather than total counts, and hiding unused tags.

Another thing I use this for, is to hide messages/threads with a
"killed"-tag.

Anyway, I don't think this solution is very "heavy-handed", since it
doesn't add any significant complexity to the UI code and for people who
know elisp, writing such a query-construction function is not something
"heavy-weight" either, so I don't think giving up the extra flexibility
is really worth it.

The only problem I see is what Carl Worth mentioned: Users unaccustomed
to elisp can't do much with this configuration variable.

> I would argue that we *always* want to display unread counts (maybe in
> addition to total counts, or maybe not).  In fact, I'm generally
> surprised by how little notmuch treats the "unread" specially, given
> how important that tag is to the user.  For example, I would similarly
> find unread counts in the search results far more useful than the
> count of messages matching the query.

I think most users would agree with this, but I still think we
should keep/make it configurable.

> Hiding unused tags also seems like a genuinely useful feature, and
> could be accomplished with a very simple customization UI (perhaps
> even linked directly from the hello buffer).
> 
> It seems to me like anything more sophisticated is better suited to a
> saved search.

I think a sensible compromise would be to allow either a function or a
string that is appended (which people could set to "and tag:unread") for
the proposed configuration variable and additionally to add a
variable that lists tags that should be hidden (which would also be
easily modifiable in M-x customize).

Cheers,
Daniel