Re: optional sleep before marking a message as "read" ?
On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 09:59:56PM -0700, Sami Samhuri wrote:
> > It was Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 10:48:05PM +0200 when Guilhem Bichot said:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Here's my question-from-a-dummy:
> > migrating from another MUA, I get caught by this in Mutt (which is
> > otherwise astonishingly efficient):
> > when I read emails using the mode where you have a list of emails in
> > the top half of the page and the body of the selected email in the
> > bottom half, as soon as I pass on one email, even if it's just for a
> > fraction of second because I'm in fact going quickly down to another
> > more important email, the email I pass on gets marked "read". So when
> > I want to come back to it later I have trouble finding it again...
> >
> > I have seen in some other MUAs: a configurable amount of time: "only
> > if I pass more than X seconds on the email then mark it as "read"".
> > I could not find the equivalent in the muttrc file.
> > Is this possible in Mutt? Is there a workaround?
> > Would you consider this a useful addition (if yes, I could contribute
> > for this; what would be the best name for the configurable time
> > variable?) ?
>
> I hadn't even thought about this since switching to mutt, but now that
> you mention it I have scanned through messages and wished they hadn't
> been marked read. I would like to see this implemented as well.
>
I think this is not needed, because mutt has index view that most of
GUI-enabled MUA-s do not have (all they have is the split-screen view). The
best comparison is Pine, where you have index view and a message (pager) view.
The few lines of index in the pager view in mutt are (IMHO) just for
informative purposes (e.g. when i read a message from a list, i can see that
there are other messages in that thread and i probably should read those too,
before replying to this message, as this reduces redundant messages to the
list).
Despite you can see few lines of index in pager view, you actually can not
navigate in the indes (have you noticed, that while in index, you can navigate
using arrow-keys, but in pager view the 'n' and 'p' are the keys to get to next
item. This means that being in pager view is considered reading the message
thus marking the message read.
If you do not want to mark this message read, but want to skip to more
important messages at the bottom, you can to several things:
* use the index mode
* use the 'N' key to mark the message Unread again (pressing 'N' probably drops
you at the next item too)
One other method that i use is the flagged-messages: the messages i consider
important, but want to deal with them later i flag and have configured mutt to
highlight them in index view and some macros to limit to flagged messages, so
that i can quickly browse through them, when i got to this part.
Best,
Laas