Re: UI enhancements
On 2007-09-02 00:44:15 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> 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.
Yeah, right, that's why we have all these menus and panels coming
out of the bottom of the screen these days, even with graphical
UIs...
> 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...
It's not about noticing, but about causing minimal confusion.
In any event, this is a question that can be settled empirically by
trying a few options.
> 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.
Incidentally, I wouldn't want to have that particular kind of UI for
myself. The current one is nicely consistent with the (emacs-style)
editors that I use, it's extremely simple, it fits well on limited
screen real estate -- what more would I want. :)
> 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.
Use "lynx -dump -with_backspaces" as your default html handler. :)
> 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.
From a design perspective, that handler should actually be an
external filter.
Cheers,
--
Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>