[notmuch] [PATCH 3/3] notmuch.el: Select tag names with completion.

[Jan Janak]

Hi Carl,

On 26-11 07:15, Carl Worth wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:10:56 +0100, Jan Janak <jan at ryngle.com> wrote:
> > Several commands ask the user for a tag name. With this feature the
> > user can just press tab and Emacs automatically retrieves the list of
> > all existing tags from notmuch database with 'notmuch search-tags' and
> > presents a completion buffer to the user.
> > 
> > This feature is very useful for users who have a large number of tags
> > because it saves typing and minimizes the risk of typos.
> 
> Jan,
> 
> This feature is incredibly useful. Thanks so much for coding it!

You are welcome!

> I've had a bunch of messages that were effectively "lost" to me since
> switching from sup. I had been experimenting with different tag
> schemes, renaming tags, etc. within sup. But in sup there was no
> global-search-based tag manipulation command, so no easy way to update
> the tag names for messages tagged under the old scheme.
> 
> I'd been aware of the problem and knew I could just code something up to
> search for those old tags. But now I get to see the full list every time
> I hit TAB in emacs. So thanks!
> 
> I do still want to unify search, search-messages, search-tags, count,
> etc. But I've gone ahead and merged this whole series as-is to get the
> functionality out there for now.

Oh, that's great, my first bigger contribution to nutmuch is in the
repository, thanks so much! 

I was just thinking about giving you some time to catch up and review all the
patches, but now I have a reason to send more again ;-).

> I assume that everyone is aware that I'm reserving the right to change
> the library and command-line interface as much as I want right now.

Yeah, I personally have no problem with that. In fact I like it.

I think that not having the user interface fixed is a good thing at this early
stage. This is what makes notmuch so hackable :-), contributors like me don't
have to worry about breaking things (at least not too much).

>From my point of view, notmuch is still missing some important features. Also,
there is a bunch of people writing front-ends and they'll probably ask for
more, too. Personally, I think it would make sense to add what is missing and,
once you feel that notuch is reasonably feature-complete, you can design nice
and intuitive user interface for it.

I'd be happy to help you update the code that I contributed once you decide to
change the command-line interface.

> If you've got code or scripts that depend on these interfaces, I highly
> recommend that you get them contributed to the notmuch repository so
> that we can fix them up as we rework the library and command line.

Yeah, I will.

> (So, Bart, I'll merge the vim stuff which is using "notmuch count"
> before I change that, so I can fixup the vim stuff at the same time.)
> 
> Thanks again, Jan! Well done.

Thanks for starting notmuch! I've been working on converting my 4GB mailbox
with about a hundred tags from gmail to notmuch and while I am not there yet,
I've made some good progress recently. That makes me really optimistic; I
tried various other mail indexing tools before and never got that far.

-Jan