queries switching from MH-E to notmuch

[Austin Clements]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:52 AM, Stephen Eglen
<S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 2. viewing both the search results and current thread
>
> I'm used to the MH-E (and VM) idea that when browsing a folder (or, here,
> search results) the top window shows the subject lines, and the bottom,
> larger, window shows the current message.  e.g. see the top screenshot
> at: http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/screenshots/.  As you scroll through the
> folder contents at the top, the bottom window shows the corresponding message.
>
> By contrast, in notmuch it seems that you either see just the search
> results, or one thread, but not both.  Would it be feasible to get
> something more like the behaviour of VM and MH-E?  I can write elisp
> fluently, but before I look into it, I thought I'd check to see whether
> this is feasible.  (I've just seen that this is the bottom item on Keith
> P's wish list: http://keithp.com/notmuch/)

I would love to have something along these lines, especially with
quick navigation in both the top and bottom panes.  One idea I'd been
toying with (but have no implementation for) was to integrate Daniel
Schoepe's two-pane thread outlining with two-pane search results: in
the top pane, show the usual thread search results but replace the
currently open thread in the search results with its thread outline.
Navigating in the top pane would naturally correspond to moving
between messages in the current thread until you reached the end (or
beginning) of the thread, at which point it would move to the next (or
previous) thread.  This may or may not work in practice, but it's
something to consider.