Re: [PATCH] Return maximum of 150 results

[James Vasile <james@hackervisions.org>]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:00:23 +0200, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> On Fri, 19 Aug 2011, James Vasile wrote:
> > Display a maximum of 150 results when searching for messages.  This
> > prevents client lag when searches return thousands of results you'll
> > never look at
> 
> I would not like this feature. If I search for something I really want
> to see everything. For example, if I want to remove inbox from many
> messages, I would search for them and press "-inbox<ret>". With your
> patch I'd not be sure whether there are some more messages or not.

Ah, I do such things from the commandline, but you are right that there
is a good use for such.

> 
> > (use the Filter command to cut down results that exceed 150).
> 
> You can start filtering while the previous search is still running, so I
> do not see problem with having bug number of results.

Yes, you can filter while the search runs, but that's not the only
problem with huge search results.  On my system, I routinely do searches
that return 15000+ messages when I'm only interested in the first
several.  When I hit Q, Emacs annoyingly asks me for permission to kill
the buffer because it has a running process.  And emacs lags as it
processes all that data.

> > 
> > Number of results can be changed by setting notmuch-max-results.
> 
> If you really want this behavior, I propose to make the default value
> of notmuch-max-results infinity.

Yes, that's probably the right answer.  I'll rework the patch to do that.