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Re: UI enhancements



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
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