On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 05:40:05PM +0200, Rocco Rutte wrote: > 1) mutt_multi_choice() is currently used to let the user choose from > quite a number of possible options. To fit in 80x25 they're abbreviated > which obviously doesn't look nice. I've put together a patch that adds a > dialog and puts it in a curses subwindow like so: I've always wanted this... Mutt already makes fine use of curses, I could never figure out why it didn't do this for menus (i.e. mutt_multi_choice()). Didn't look at the code but the images look good, except the resulting panel seems to need a space inserted down the left side for balance/symmetry. I also wonder how the choice of background/foreground colors gets made for this, and whether the default background and foreground colors shouldn't be used, perhaps with a different color used to highlight the key sequence needed to activate a given action... On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 08:52:40PM +0200, Thomas Roessler wrote: > Sounds like a good idea. I wonder, though, whether it might be > useful to move the subwindow toward the bottom of the screen, to > basically grow out of the status bar / entry line. This, on the other hand, seems kind of yucky to me... not because there's anything inherently bad about it, but just because it breaks with long-standing UI design practices. Dialog boxes generally go in the middle of the main window, and menus typically go at the top of the main window. mutt_multi_choice() can arguably be considered either one of those, though it strikes me that these are being used more like a dialog box than a traditional menu, but either way putting those things at the bottom of application windows is not common and just seems wrong to me. No offense TR... And if a big dialog box pops up in the middle of your window, you're not going to fail to notice it, no matter how much experience you have using Mutt... FWIW, I've also always wanted Mutt to have a multi-paned interface, not unlike most GUI mailers: one pane for the folder list, one for the message index, and one to display messages. Ideally, it should be possible to arrange the orientation of the 3 different panels, much as you could in at least some GUI mailers.It would be virtually impossible to fit it all in 80 columns (at least, you couldn't do it sanely without more or less treating all messages as format-flowed), but you'd (naturally) be able to turn the extra panes off, and I think it's become a lot less common for people to use 80-column displays to read their mail these days... I was about the last person I personally knew who still did, and even I don't do it that often anymore... On the occasion when I still do, it generally draws jeers from my associates. Sigh. If Mutt had this feature though, I'd definitely start using large windows all the time. As it stands, the only reason I do it now is so I can see more of the subject line in the message index. Otherwise, the extra width is mostly wasted due to people keeping their messages < 80 columns wide. I've also always wanted Mutt to have the ability to spawn a compose-message window while still displaying the message I was reading, so I can refer to it as I type (e.g. if I want to comment on a different message than the one I'm replying to). But I think in order to pull this off you'd need to make mutt multi-threaded and introduce a whole lot of complexity that the current code base tries hard to avoid, which possibly might cause it to melt down. I think you'd also need to either implement a terminal emulator in Mutt (so people could still run whatever editor they like, right inside Mutt's window), or an internal screen editor, and force people to use it if they want this feature. Yucky, both. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a cleaner way, though someone a lot more familiar with curses (or other similar libraries) than I might know some clever tricks. That's the direction I think Mutt should be headed. If I a) had more free time, and b) weren't so darn lazy, I'd probably start working on this myself. I would also not mind at all if Mutt had an optional GUI interface... HTML mail is so prevalent that I'd really like it if Mutt could do some (extremely) basic HTML formatting, like handling <b>, <i>, and <tt> tags, and displaying inline images. Yeah yeah bloat blah, but it's just a lot more convenient if I don't have to launch external applications to view these extremely common forms of e-mail. I'm in no way suggesting that the GUI interface should/could replace the terminal-oriented interface... just that both are often quite useful. I'm also aware that mutt can do formatting of rtf messages, but that requires that people actually SEND rtf mail, which pretty much no one ever does, so it's not a terribly useful feature. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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