Re: Happy New Year!

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Friday, January  2 at 04:18 PM, quoth Chris Jones:
> Since I wasn't blessed with photographic memory, the only thing 
> that's missing in mutt's interface as far as I am concerned is some 
> form of screen-splitting capablity that would let me display/scroll 
> a few messages in "windows" in that huge vacant empty space at the 
> right of the screen while replying to one post rather than have to 
> switch to another screen "window" and fire up another instance of 
> mutt because I can't remember who said what .. when .. etc. That's 
> one patch I would love to be able to write.

Heh. Baloney - what you really want is the ability to have multiple 
mutt's up and visible at the same time in the same terminal, right? I 
mean, dig into vim's behavior a bit, and that's essentially what it 
does. Granted, there's a single engine behind the whole thing, but 
essentially vim is an editing engine that operates on "buffers", and 
vim's screen splitting gives you full vim functionality on another 
buffer (which can be tied to the same file as the original buffer or 
can be something else entirely). The connection between buffers in a 
split-vim is somewhat tenuous... the copy-paste buffers are shared, 
and there's some variable scoping you can do, but that's about it.

And what, really, do you want these two mutt "screens" to share? Do 
you care whether they use the same connection to the server or not? 
(I'm guessing no). Do you want hooks that trigger in one to affect the 
other? To put it a different way, do you want them to share the 
current configuration? (I'm guessing no - and a power user would 
probably say "absolutely not!"))

So, when you think about it, you're actually asking for a kind of 
"meta"-mutt that maintains multiple mutts and allows you to see them 
and keep them up at the same time and makes it convenient (and fast) 
to switch between them. Right?

 From that perspective, what's wrong with running multiple screen 
sessions? GNU Screen can split the terminal, and allows you to run 
multiple mutts in the same terminal (ctrl-a S).

As I see it, the biggest problem with GNU Screen's split-terminal 
approach is that the keys for switching between sections is *awful* - 
vim's ability to do control-W-{direction} is much better. GNU Screen 
needs a patch (http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/) to do vertical splits 
of course, but supposedly version 4.1 will have that natively. And of  
course, you'd want screen to simply start up another mutt 
automatically when you split the screen. You can *kinda* get that by 
running screen like this:

     env SHELL=mutt screen

... but that's not perfect (there *ought* to be a way to make GNU 
screen automatically run $SHELL for a newly created region, but I 
can't find it in the documentation at the moment).

Anyway, it *seems* like GNU Screen 4.1 will solve the problem, more or 
less, right?

~Kyle
- -- 
We live at the intersection of mysterious freedoms, God's and our own.
                                          -- Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan
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