Re: announce: my fork of alot

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 6:13 PM Johannes Larsen <mail@johslarsen.net> wrote:
>
> 2021-05-17 00:32:09, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Have you tried notmuch-vim?
>
> Yes, I have tried it, but I did not like its thread view though. Maybe
> that mbox-like view of all messages in a thread works fine if there few
> messages per thread, but I interact with a lot of mailing-lists where it
> is not uncommon with 20+ messages in a thread, and then I kind of need
> some sort of hierarchic view of messages to keep my bearings.

I hear you.

I do interact with such mailing lists, but _usually_ I only deal with
the new messages on the thread, not *all* messages. In that scenario
the thread-view works fine.

However, when I'm looking at old threads that I neglected, then it is
a bit cumbersome. I agree with you.

I'm not unfamiliar with big threads: my last big thread is of
yesterday: 45 messages [1].

I do have some experimental code in which I started rewriting
notmuch-vim from scratch, and one of the first thoughts I had was: why
not use a hierarchical view? In fact I don't think it would be that
difficult; we could use vim folds in order to expand/contract
subthreads.

There's a lot of other things to do first though.

> Also, I have been using vim as my primary editor/IDE for decades, so I
> am kind of scared of bundling even more features into that setup. When I
> am dealing with dozens of plugins and thousands of lines with vimscript
> configuration already, then it is not so uncommon for some of them to
> interact badly with each other.

Sure, but in modern versions of vim (since 7.0?) there is an autoload
feature [2]. With that feature nothing actually happens unless you (or
some code) calls that function. There's absolutely no way autoload
code can interact with another plugin if you have not issued a
:NotMuch command specifically.

Granted: the current version of notmuch-vim doesn't use this autoload
feature, although I suspect much of the code normally is hidden from
view (until you call :NotMuch). I'm not entirely sure, and it's better
to make sure using autoload.

This is something I could do in probably less than 30 minutes, if it's
truly a blocker for you... But again... I think there's a lot of
things to do first; that's why I haven't done it yet.

Of course, any issues you find you are more than welcome to report on
the issue tracker.

Cheers.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20210511222754.417371-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/
[2] https://vimhelp.org/eval.txt.html#autoload

-- 
Felipe Contreras