Re: Wish: -r option to recover a crashed session
On 2004-07-05, Mun Johl <mun_johl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2004 at 07:33 PM PDT, Brett Carrington wrote:
> BC> It's not really mutt's job to do that. You might look into using
> BC> screen(1).
>
> I don't understand why it's not mutt's job. All I'm saying is that as
> someone takes an action on an email (delete, apply label, etc), that
> action be recorded in some file up until the next sync. That way if for
> some reason mutt abnormally terminates before one can sync the mail
> folder, one can re-start mutt with a recovery option and it would "play
> back" the recovery file automatically; much the way vi does with it's -r
> option.
>
> This type of feature would be very welcomed by me. But maybe I'm the
> only one that has had mutt die on me in the middle of cleaning up a
> folder after I've read through and marked and 10's or 100's of them for
> deletion.
It could be argued that this should be a feature of mutt. However,
it's generally difficult to properly save and restore the state of a
program that hasn't been written from the start to allow that,
especially when you need to avoid repeating actions with persistent
side-effects (such as saving a file). Further, as was already said,
an excellent solution already exists: screen. It won't save you if
mutt itself dies, but if your remote connection dies, screen
maintains the state of mutt--and any other program you have
running--until you restore the connection and restore screen. Then
you are back to exactly where you were when your connection died.
It has saved me on numerous occasions. You really should check it
out.
Gary
--
Gary Johnson | Agilent Technologies
garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Wireless Division
http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/ | Spokane, Washington, USA