Re: mutt/2019: menu_context itches (Re: your mail)

[David Champion <dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* On 2005.08.02, in <20050802171922.GN12341@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
*       "Kyle Wheeler" <kyle-mutt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Well, let's see... I used to use menu_scroll=no menu_move_off=yes for my 
> inbox, which gives me a sense of "pages" when I scroll. The last "page" 
> of my inbox typically has a bunch of blank lines at the end. But I've 

Right, this is what I use, and it's the conventional default.

(On that point, I don't think that changing mutt's default behavior in
this way is really a good idea.  It's not a personal preference -- since
my muttrc is already huge, it's not big thing either way for me.  But I
think the change will surprise a lot of old users, whether they end up
liking it or not.)


> recently decided that I like menu_move_off=no better, which makes sure 
> there aren't any blank lines at the end.

Yeah, that's what I hate. :)

Here's where I've been confused: menu_scroll=no/menu_move_off=no also
means that down-arrowing scrolls one message at a time, implicitly, *on
the last screen*.  Since that's the primary effect of menu_scroll (but
for any screen), this appeared confusing to me.

I see now that the behavior is different on all pages except the last.


So, as you see, I find the manual explanation of menu_move_off very
confusing -- it doesn't make sense to me to think of it in terms of the
bottom of a menu scrolling past the bottom of the screen.

How about this, instead:

  { "menu_scroll_fill",    DT_BOOL, R_NONE, OPTMENUSCROLLFILL, 0 },
  /*
  ** .pp
  ** When \fIset\fP, the last page of multi-page menu lists will attempt
  ** to fill all available space on the screen, and line scrolling on
  ** the last page will scroll one line at a time (instead of skipping
  ** to a mostly-empty screen).  When \fIunset\fP, the last page will
  ** leave whitespace up to the end of the screen, and line scrolling on
  ** the last page will skip to a new, short page.
  **
  ** This option has no effect when ``$menu_scroll'' is set.
  */

I've been thinkig about it a lot now, so my perspective is skewed, but I
*think* that tells me more about the difference.

Note that the semantics of the setting in the mutt code are inverted
with this explanation.

-- 
 -D.    dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx        NSIT    University of Chicago