Re: split display?
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:37:12PM +0200, Christian Ebert wrote:
>
> I still think http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#patterns
> covers a lot of what you want. Or you have to explain more
> clearly in what way your "categories" differ from a limiting
> pattern.
Thanks, I'll check that out. I think there are some important
differences between search patterns and categories:
I would need to know exactly which pattern will show only those
messages I want to see, and all of them. I don't know such patterns. I
might have an idea of what I could search for, but it only means that
I eventually have to spend a lot of time searching and trying to
figure out search patterns.
I would have to keep figuring out search patterns and categorizing the
same messages over and over again by means of search patterns each
time I want to work with any. I take it you can have only one pattern
in use to limit the display because mutt doesn't have a way to display
mail going by which of the search patterns apply to it.
Categories are not volatile like search patterns are. They are there
when I need them and when I don't. My inbox isn't messed up anymore
with all kinds of different mail because the mails are sorted into
categories.
> Once you're done you can tag those messages with the same pattern
> and move them to their final storage.
But they need to remain in the inbox until I'm done with them.
> >> This discussion about Sup on mutt-dev might be worth a look.
>
> Forgot the link: http://marc.info/?t=124685615600001&r=1&w=2
>
> The thread also mentions the X-Label patch:
>
> http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/mutt/#x-label
Yeah ... This patch might be very helpful, but I wonder how the
messages get those labels. When you have the patch, can you edit the
label with mutt and then use it to limit the display?
If you can edit the labels, I could use it to create categories. But
having to edit all the labels instead of just assigning an existing
label to a mail (as another way of assigning a mail to a category)
would still be inconvenient and prone to errors (mistype a label, and
you never find that mail again).
It still wouldn't solve the problem of keeping a conversation
together, i. e. sent mail together with received mail, preferably
displayed as a thread. Without categories, there's probably no way to
solve that.
> But! If you want to search *across* mailboxes (sorry if I didn't
> entirely grasp your example) I would use mairix, also mentioned
> in above thread.
Yeah, I tried mairix a while ago when I wanted to find a particular
information that I knew would be stored in a mail somewhere. It
worked, but it's rare that I do that. Once a message is out of the
inbox, I usually don't need to dig it up again.
But if mails would keep the information to which categories they once
belonged, it wouldn't matter at all in which maildir they are stored
as long as this feature is available. Mutt would need to keep a list
of categories that aren't in use anymore, or have to be able to
recreate such categories from information stored in the mail. Once you
found the category, you can have all mail displayed that ever belonged
to the category, and you would eventually even get references to other
categories.
Forget mairix --- you can be lucky when you can think of the right
search pattern, and even if you get results, you never know if there
is another mail with exactly the information you were looking for, but
it wasn't found because you'd have to use a different
pattern. Searching for mail with patterns isn't very useful. MUAs
should be able to do much better than that.
> > Anyway, what is sup? Another MUA?
>
> Yes: http://sup.rubyforge.org/
I'll try it out on a copy of my mails. What I don't like about it is
that they are using some libraries that aren't maintained anymore, and
they already seem to have bugs coming up because of that. That doesn't
speak for the reliability of sup.