Dangerous space bar key (was: Preventing the user shooting themself in the foot)

[Austin Clements]

Quoth Jameson Graef Rollins on Jul 07 at  1:40 pm:
> On Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:49:35 +0200, Matthieu Lemerre <racin at free.fr> wrote:
> > On Wed, 6 Jul 2011 09:25:41 -0400, Austin Clements <amdragon at mit.edu> wrote:
> > > * Make SPC mark the *current* message read and move to the next one,
> > > rather than moving to the next and marking it read.  This way, you're
> > > acknowledging the message as read once you've actually read it, rather
> > > than having notmuch mark it read before you've actually read it.
> > 
> > I agree. I think it's up to the user to define whether he read the
> > message. In fact as a consequence, I have no use of the 'unread' tag.
> 
> I would like to argue very strongly in favor of the current behavior of
> the "unread" tag (since I'm actually the one that designed it).  I want
> the unread flag to always just be handled automatically, being
> automatically removed when I view a message without me having to do
> anything.  If users want to have tags that they manually control, they
> should just define those tags in the new.tags config.

What I'm suggesting is no more or less automatic than the current
behavior.  It's just a slight tweak to the order in which things
happen: that SPC could remove the unread tag and then move to the next
message, rather than the other way around.  In effect, the read tag
would indicate that you've seen the bottom of the message, not just
the top.

It's also possible I would have less trouble if SPC didn't
automatically go to the next thread.  The problem I have with the
current behavior is that I often find myself accidentally marking
messages as read because notmuch showed me a message I wasn't
expecting.  This is compounded by the lack of visual feedback when
this happens (e.g., the search results don't update to indicate that
anything has changed, and even if they did, I probably wouldn't notice
that the message *had* been unread).