Re: notmuch.el and replying to multiple emails at once

["Dan Čermák" <dan.cermak@posteo.net>]

Jose A Ortega Ruiz <jao@gnu.org> writes:

> On Tue, Nov 08 2022, Alexander Adolf wrote:
>
>> Matt Armstrong <matt@rfc20.org> writes:
>>
>>> A feature I miss from Gnus is being able to reply to multiple emails at
>>> once.  Has anyone else found to be a missing feature?
>>
>> I have, and support your request.
>>
>> But not only to reply, but more generally to act on (tag, reply,
>> forward) multiple emails.
>>
>> Of course I can select multiple _contiguous_ lines in a search result
>> list, or tree view, and do something with these messages
>> (`notmuch-search-tag` being an obvious example). But not when my
>> selection is (or would be) non-contiguous.
>>
>>> I wonder if it would be easy to add to notmuch's Emacs MUA.
>>> [...]
>>> Problem is, I can't think of an unobtrusive way to add this to notmuch
>>> without adding a lot of machinery.
>>
>> Perhaps the problem can be split into smaller pieces?
>>
>> I think one piece could be to enable the user to select multiple regions
>> (think e.g. zones.el [1]), which could be a problem entirely separate
>> from notmuch.el?
>>
>> [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Zones
>>
>> The second piece could be to extend notmuch.el to make use of multiple
>> regions, and implement more functions that act on such regions. Since
>> there doesn't seem to be a "standard way" of doing non-contiguous
>> regions in Emacs, one third-party "multi-region package" (e.g. zones.el)
>> would need to be picked, and notmuch.el made to detect it's availability
>> and make use of it.
>
> In notmuch-tree at least, this can be implemented, i think, in a much
> simpler way.  There (and i guess in any other search list), every line
> in the buffer represents a message, and there is already a record (as
> text properties) describing the message (its id, subject, tags,
> filename, even indentation level in my outline extension).  It'd be
> pretty easy to add a new "marked" flag to those properties, that could
> be added by a simple key shortcut in the same way Gnus does (adding on
> top of that addition of contiguous messages in a region is again
> trivial).  It's also not much more complicated to add things like
> "select all messages in this thread".  With that selection mechanism in
> place, one could at any moment ask for the list of marked messages and
> their properties, which contain all the information needed to perform
> operations such as replies or tagging (the latter being much easier to
> implement; the part about multiple replies needs a bit more work, but
> possibly one could re-use whatever functions gnus is already providing
> to compose the reply buffer--notmuch already uses some of those
> facilities).

FTR, David Bremner suggested a workaround along those lines in
id:87o7z31iwp.fsf@tethera.net (email from Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:41:58 -0300)