Re: [PATCH] remove message archiving from show-advance-and-archive

[Dirk Hohndel <hohndel@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:50:15 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 10:49:43 -0400, Jameson Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:
> > The function to advance through threads with the space bar is useful.
> > However, the current implementation also archives messages.  The idea
> > of archiving a message should not be intertwined with the processes of
> > advancing through messages to read them.  Archiving in general should
> > be a separate operation that one does explicitly.  This patch just
> > renames the advance function "notmuch-show-advance", and removes the
> > archiving of a thread when the end of the thread is reached.
> 
> The other piece of the magic space bar that people have complained about
> is that it intertwines advancing among messages within one thread with
> advancing from one thread to the next. (And only the first operation is
> reversible by backspace.)

This has always confused me - I think I've complained about it before as
well :)
 
> I think we'll probably want to change that at the same time.
> 
> Meanwhile, I'm currently working on support for piping a whole thread of
> messages as an mbox to a process, (mostly getting bogged down in trying
> to fix mbox support in git).
> 
> For that, I think I want the current '|' binding to pipe the current
> message and then a new binding ("M-|" ?) to pipe every (open) message in
> the thread.
> 
> Which makes me think that other operations should work similarly. '+'
> and '-' should change tags on the current message (as they do currently)
> and then new "M-+" and "M--" could change tags on all (open) messages in
> the thread.
> 
> That would highlight the current 'a' as out of place since it's
> currently archiving every message in the thread. So I'd then fix it to
> be 'a' for the current message and "M-a" for every (open) message in the
> thread.

I really like this. It's consistent and I'm sure I'll get used to it
quickly. The only question now is "all messages in a thread" or "all
open messages in a thread". I'd vote for all.

Oh - and I really want a way to do surgery on threads. Merge threads to
fix Blackberry users breaking threads. And split threads for
hijackers... 

/D

-- 
Dirk Hohndel
Intel Open Source Technology Center