a python terminal gui?

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 20 May 2011 11:47:41 +0100, Patrick Totzke <patricktotzke at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Patrick. Welcome to notmuch.

> First of all, Thanks to everybody involved in the project. Using notmuch is
> good fun

I'm really pleased that you are finding notmuch to be fun and useful.

> However, as a vim user I feel that the one thing that's truly missing is a 
> maintainable, feature-rich commandline GUI.

"... that's not implemented in emacs" you mean? ;-)

> I'm aware of existing proposed guis: vala-notmuch, notsomuch, I have also seen 
> a minimal non-oop python gui that doesn't use the python bindings and
> whose name 

It's funny to me that you used the name "notmuch-gui" since I've always
understood the 'G' in GUI to indicate "graphical", to distinguish from
non-graphical terminal interfaces like you propose here.

Anyway, I'm quite pleased to see you working on this and I wish you lots
of success.

>   On the other hand, cnotmuch and all other libs I (plan to) use in this project
>   were easy_installed without any problems.

Is the name "cnotmuch" still current anywhere? Long ago, (perhaps a year
ago last April when we incorporated the python bindings into the notmuch
repository), we decided that the python bindings should be named
"notmuch" rather than "cnotmuch".

I notice that notmuch/python/bindings/README does still mention
"cnotmuch" in some of the explanatory text. But, significantly, it has
"import notmuch" in its code example. (On a similar note, I also notice
that this README doesn't provide installation instructions, nor is there
anything like a "make install" target for the bindings. So this could
probably be integrated more cleanly.)

I believe all new code should be doing "import notmuch" rather than
"import cnotmuch", and if there is any package that installs bindings
that work as "cnotmuch" we should get those updated right away.

Incidentally, the python-notmuch Debian package does provide "notmuch"
rather than "cnotmuch".

> You can find the code at here: https://github.com/pazz/notmuch-gui 

I've got the code and was able to run it after changing each occurrence
of:

	from cnotmuch.notmuch import ...
to:
	from notmuch import

I was a bit surprised to see so many results in my initial view. I'd
expect a default view to be tag:inbox rather than tag:unread. (I didn't
realize I had over 100 thousand messages with the unread tag, but
apparently I do.) Perhaps that's a sup default that I've long since
forgotten?


Anyway, I was able to get the "i" and "u" keybindings to work at least.

Here are a few of my immediate thoughts:

  * The interface blocks for a while when searching for something (like
    "tag:unread" in my case) that returns a *lot* of results. Are you
    somehow sucking in all the results immediately rather than just what
    you need to dill the current screen?

  * I was a bit surprised that 'i' and 'u' kept opening new buffers
    rather than switching to an existing buffer.

  * The '/' key didn't seem to do anything for me, so I wasn't able to
    actually do any custom searches.

> I consider all of this to be a proof-of-concept, any part of this proposal
> is up for discussion.

It looks like a fine start to me. Please let me know if there's anything
I can do to help with this, (in terms of hosting the code or anything
else).

-Carl
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