Re: [PATCH] Customize saved search order separately from regular search order

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

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On Tue, 04 May 2010 12:02:22 +0100, David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> wrote:
> On Mon,  3 May 2010 13:58:27 -0700, Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com> wrote:
> > I use 'saved searches' as a folder mechanism and want them to be shown
> > oldest first. Otherwise, while searching for messages normally, I want
> > to see the most recent messages first. This patch makes these two
> > default search orders separate.
> 
> This is a nice patch.

I think this is a nice start, but that we actually want a different
notion here.

Keith happens to use saved searches only for subsets of his inbox and in
that case, it makes a lot of sense to see the results of all of these
messages in an oldest-first order.

But saved searches are also useful for simply capturing what might be an
often-used but otherwise painful-to-keep-retyping search expression
where the user really wants the results to appear with the newest
message first, (which is the default search-results order after all).

So I think what we actually want here is an additional member for our
saved-search tuple which indicates the desired search order for that
particular search. That's the only way I see to support a single user
who wants to take advantage of both kinds of searches.

Thoughts?

A separated, but perhaps related idea would be to explicitly support the
notion of one search being a subset of another. I have an "inbox" search
(tag:inbox) and several searches that are subsets, ("notmuch" is
"tag:notmuch and tag:inbox"). If this were setup as an actual hierarchy
it might have two advantages:

	1. It would be a bit simpler to specify all of theses searches,
	   I wouldn't have to keep repeating "and tag:inbox" in each.
	   This would be particularly important if I changed the
	   criteria for the top-level search.

	2. If the various levels of the hierarchy were displayed
	   separately it would be easier for me to focus on processing
	   all of my inbox folders (which happen to be
	   oldest-first)--archiving each down to 0 messages, without
	   being distracted by several (newest-first) saved searches
	   that will only ever grow and don't have any
	   processing/archiving associated with them.

I think that currently I'm not using any of these
always-growing/newest-first searches in part because they would be mixed
up with my inbox-subset folders and would thereby be distracting. So (2)
above would allow me to start using them, and then I would want the
feature to selectively set the search order.

-Carl

-- 
carl.d.worth@intel.com

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