[PATCH] emacs: add some convenience functions to show mode

[Jameson Rollins]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:35:31 -0800, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> These look fairly handy.
> 
> But, since I know our current keybindings are less-than-perfect, I would
> prefer to see patches that also fix them, (rather than just adding
> functionality that new users can't get at without manual customization).
> 
> Would you accept an invitation to make a proposal (with patch) to
> actually improve the default keybindings here as well?

Hey, Carl.  I could do this, but I think I would ultimately just be
submitting patches for notmuch to behave in the specific way that I want
it to behave.  I'm pretty sure that everyone has different ideas of what
they want, and I worry that if I start submitting my preference we'll
have to contend with lots of debate over behavior preference, leading to
lots of requests for more configuration options.  This has actually
already happened, most recently with my patch to remove thread archiving
From the show-advance function [0].

My thought instead is that if we have a nice library of useful atomic
functions, for things like tagging and thread navigation, it would make
it easy for people to construct the exact behavior they want by defining
their own functions and key bindings.  It's quite easy to do this, as
I've tried to point out in the emacstips page.  If we had good
documentation for the available functions and for how to implement
custom bindings we could make it pretty easy for users to get the exact
behavior they desire.

I could definitely submit a series of patches that would define what I
personally consider ideal behavior, but since I'm quite sure that others
would disagree with my choices, I think the patches would ultimately not
be accepted and the work would therefore not be worth the trouble.

I'm definitely not trying to sound cynical here.  I'm just trying to be
realistic about the variety of personal preference.  But like I say, I'd
be happy to impose mine on everyone else if people would be ok with it!

jamie.

[0] id:"87eiaqwmzh.fsf at servo.finestructure.net"
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