Unread handling

[Johan Parin <johanparin@gmail.com>]

I'm probably doing something wrong but I find myself frustrated with the
handling of unread in the emacs-mua.

In notmuch-search I found the default bold face for unread of
notmuch-search-unread-face not enough to make them stand out so I tried
something like

  (setq notmuch-search-line-faces
      '(("unread" . '(:foreground "SkyeBlue"))

which ought to work according to the doc, but did not work. Fortunately
however it works to define a new face with defface and use that.

  (setq notmuch-search-line-faces
        '(("unread" . my/notmuch-unread-face)))

So that problem solved.

My real frustration lies in the thread view. Typically threads will be
partially read and I want to read only unread messages.

I find the show view confusing because I don't clearly see the message
boundaries. Also I always need to start with C-u M-RET to get an
overview of the thread. In this view the unread stand out a bit due to
the colorization of the unread tag, which is typically visible. I still
would like to be able to colorize the entire line or the author here,
for unread. Is it possible?

I'm trying instead to use the tree view, this seems to me the more
natural way to view threads. So I immediately do `Z' whenever I enter a
thread. I would like to have the option to enter tree view automatically
for a thread from the search buffer. Is it possible?

In tree view however, again I would like to colorize the unread
messages. Haven't found a way to do this and reading notmuch-tree.el it
seems it's not possible. Is there a way? Since I like to keep my window
to 80 chars the tag display is outside the visible area and I find
myself doing C-e to find the unread tags. This is very inconvenient.

Also I would like to navigate to the next unread message, and would
prefer the `n' binding to do that instead of go to next message. Haven't
found a binding for that.

Finally when entering the tree view I would like the first unread
message to automatically be shown.

I guess the above can be summarized as, I would like to have the option
to have a gnus-ish way of viewing threads.

Again, I'm probably doing something wrong and / or am missing some
possibilities here, it would be very interesting to hear others work
flow for thread reading.


/Johan