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wangp / bower

A curses terminal client for the Notmuch email system
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Feature : selection views browsing #31

Closed frediz closed 3 years ago

frediz commented 6 years ago

Hi, one feature I really miss is the possibility of having "views" that would correspond to folders I guess in other mailers. For example I'd like to be able to quickly switch between different views based on the limit command for example : "tag:inbox" to "tag:debian" to "tag:bugs and ~d today" etc Maybe with shortcuts associated with those different selections. Or a single shortcut able to cycle in a list of selections : 

[command]
  views_cycle = "tag:inbox; tag:debian; tag:bugs and ~d today"

I don't know if it's on the roadmap and other feels the need, but I clearly often use "l" to change my current view and change to the same kind of views. I end up launching several bower instances each one having one specific selection and cycle through my terminals.

F.

wangp commented 6 years ago

You can create search aliases with short names:

[bower:search_alias]
x=....
y=...

then switch views with ~ x <ENTER>.

I've considered a key to immediately swap back to the previous search. l <UP> <ENTER> is fine enough that I haven't bothered yet.

frediz commented 6 years ago

Indeed for search aliases, better than nothing, but still several keys away from another search :) I do as you do for the time being, that is, use the history to switch to another search.

seifferth commented 4 years ago

Sorry for replying to a thread that hasn't seen any action in years ;)

My solution to this issue has been to use single-letter aliases as well. I use ~u for unread, for instance, and ~f for flagged, so I am always just three keys away from one of my standard searches (~u<Enter> or ~f<Enter>, for instance). Today I played around with using the Alt key for switching between these aliases. I assigned Alt+Key as kind of a shortcut for ~<Key><Enter> and it feels pretty neat. Now I can simply use Alt+u and Alt+f for the searches mentioned above.

I believe that the user experience you get with this is pretty similar to how other applications handle views/buffers/windows (or whatever you want to call them). In irssi you can use Alt+1, Alt+2, etc. to switch between windows. Using the generalised Alt+Key one could define ~1 and ~2 as search aliases and get the same experience. I didn't see any need to limit the implementation to number keys, though.

I am not entirely sure if this is actually needed, but since the approach turned out to be really simple, and since Alt isn't used at all in the index view, I guess I might as well create a pull request.

seifferth commented 3 years ago

Is this still an issue, or did the Alt+Key shortcut solve it?

wangp commented 3 years ago

I'm happy with it. Reopen if required.