From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cworth@cworth.org (Carl Worth) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:12:35 -0700 Subject: [sup-talk] Why inbox-mode instead of default search? In-Reply-To: <1254323181-sup-1735@masanjin.net> References: <1254070015-sup-5151@kronos> <1254073440-sup-2700@masanjin.net> <1254074517-sup-4465@kronos> <1254323181-sup-1735@masanjin.net> Message-ID: <1254326318-sup-904@yoom.home.cworth.org> Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Wed Sep 30 08:16:35 -0700 2009: > How does the notion of killing a thread that makes sense except in the > context of having an special inbox mode? The kill-thread notion can be handled in multiple ways without a special inbox mode. One way would be to simply not apply the inbox label to new messages belonging to killed threads. A better way would be to expand the search capability to something like: Search for all threads containing messages matching AND exclude all threads containing messages matching I'd be happy to have that kind of functionality for arbitrary labels that would function like killed for specific searches. > The inbox is magical, because you do different things with your inbox > than you do with non-inbox buffers: you classify threads into a) I'm > done with this thread for now, but let me know if someone replies > (archive); b) I'm done with this thread for now and don't let me know if > someone replies (kill); c) I'll deal with this later (ignore). It's definitely true that reading new mail is a different activity than searching old mail, (note my recent patch that provides different sort orders for these two operations). But there are at least two problems with the current inbox mode implemented separately from the search mode: 1. Some functionality appears in only one or the other of the modes. Refine search is the easy-to-notice one that we've talked about. But really, any keybindings performing distinct actions in these two modes is just confusing. The two modes are far too similar to have independent lists of possible actions and bindings. This should be unified. 2. There are some things that are currently implemented as "magic" in inbox mode that should really be made available to all searches. Things like the archive operation making a message disappear from the inbox. Instead, any operation making a message no longer satisfy the current search should cause it to disappear from the current view. > > A patch to add this command to inbox-mode appears in the August sup-talk > > archive. I would like to see this feature become part of the base system. > > I agree. One shortcoming of that patch is that refined versions of the inbox come up in search-results-mode, not inbox-mode. So you don't actually get what you want yet, (such as archiving no longer works the same in a refined inbox as it does in the raw inbox). Or said another way, you would get exactly what you want if there was nothing magic about inbox. -Carl -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 190 bytes Desc: not available URL: