Emacs paned UI

Emacs paned UI

[Tad Fisher]

Hello everyone!

I've been using notmuch and following its development for a little while
now, and I've come to like it very much. One thing that has been lacking
is an easy-to-use Emacs interface, and I believe Keith and Carl had a
little discussion a while back about how we should go about making a
paned UI.

So, I dusted off my Elisp manual and hacked up notmuch.el to support a
3-paned UI. This involved the creation of a minor mode (I call it
notmuch-browse-mode) that manages window state, along with several
modifications of existing functions to "do the right thing" when we're
in browse-mode (such as close the "show" window, switch to the "folder"
window, etc.).

The UI is thus far usable, but not bug-free. For example,
advancing-and-archiving using SPC sometimes "advances" to the same
message (but I am always able to advance with "a"). Also, the search
window does not update after archiving, but I believe this is an
existing bug.

The code is in the "emacs-ui" branch of the following repo:

git://github.com/tadfisher/notmuch-tad.git

Suggestions, criticism, and a code review are both needed and desired.

-- 
Tad Fisher
tadfisher@gmail.com

sent via something other than notmuch: http://notmuchmail.org/

Re: Emacs paned UI

[Jameson Rollins]

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On Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:05:40 -0800, Tad Fisher <tadfisher@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I dusted off my Elisp manual and hacked up notmuch.el to support a
> 3-paned UI. This involved the creation of a minor mode (I call it
> notmuch-browse-mode) that manages window state, along with several
> modifications of existing functions to "do the right thing" when we're
> in browse-mode (such as close the "show" window, switch to the "folder"
> window, etc.).

Hey, Tad.  Thanks so much for persuing this!  I was definitely looking
to put something like this together myself, but your elisp foo is a lot
better than mine.  A couple comments:

* I actually would prefer just a two-paned layout, since I don't use
  folders.  Is there a way to configure it to check if there are folders
  defined, and not show the third panel if there isn't?

* I would also like to see the focus remain in the notmuch-search buffer
  all the time, unless I specifically switch to the notmuch-show
  buffer.  I would really like things to behave more like mutt, where
  I'm scrolling through my mail from notmuch-search, but then the
  messages themselves are just being displayed in the lower pane.  Does
  that make sense?

jamie.

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