Re: notmuch 'index' mode.

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:18:33 -0800, Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:06:06 +0100, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:
> > 
> >   * The mode documentation really needs to walk the user through how to
> >     setup a custom set of folders.
> 
> You can use the standard emacs customization interface, although it's
> not exactly well documented there. Additional docs are clearly
> indicated.

Yes. I think that's a bit too hidden.

I'm imagining the case of a new user running notmuch. First, if we're
going to allow them to start off from inside emacs rather than the
command-line (and why not?) then I think we can pretty much just run
"notmuch setup" and "notmuch new" for the user (and those walk the user
through things well already.

Then, I'd like the user to be seeing the folder view right away (since
that's the primary view). We've got support for searching while still
indexing, so if we refresh occasionally, the user will be able to see
the inbox count just count up while indexing occurs.

So what next for the user? We've got lots of empty space in the folder
view, so I think what I'd like is to provide some suggestions on search
strings to try, and then to make it obvious how to associate a name with
a search string. And at that point, I'd like that name to be added to
the folder view.

And notice, I don't think we'll need to do the "virtual tag" thing of
associating a tag name with a search and doing the work of making
notmuch maintain the consistency of that tag and search string. It will
be much more clean (and shouldn't be any less fast) to just do the
searches for the original search terms, (rather than searching for tag
terms that were previously applied by searching for the search terms).

Then tags become something that are just for manual manipulation. What
do you think?

> >   * It's not opening my "to-me" folder for some reason. (I thought it
> >     was the '-' at first, but "xorg-board" is working fine). I can debug
> >     this later.
> 
> It shouldn't work on xorg-board either -- it just skips forward one
> 'word' and assumes it's gotten the folder name. Lame programming, I
> know. Should be easy to fix.

Ah, that's it. So "xorg-board" only looked like it worked because I had
a "xorg" folder as well. :-)

> What more do you need? Pretty fonts? Icons? A pony?

Heh. Just some guidance on what the user can do. It's nice that we have
room to do this, (since we don't on the search results view).

> Threads or messages? Threads are more expensive to compute, and when the
> number is zero, it means the same thing. But, it is surprising to see a
> huge number in the folder view and then get only a handful of threads in
> the search view. Perhaps if the count is small enough we can go through
> and actually figure out how many threads are involved.

Maybe something like that.

-Carl