rewind and text/plain hooks and visual-line-mode and ...

David Edmondson dme at dme.org
Fri Dec 30 02:12:58 PST 2011


After setting up a new user recently[1] and discussion with j4ni, it
occurred to me that some of my recent patches are interrelated in a way
that I didn't previously realise.

Getting natural feeling `notmuch-show-rewind' behaviour (latest patches
are [2]) is made more difficult if `truncate-lines' is set to `nil',
because the cursor can end up somewhere at the end of a wrapped header
line when the start of the header line is not visible on the screen. The
current code has some tests for 'near the top of the window' that might
address this, but I removed them.

In general I think that having `truncate-lines' set to `t' in
`notmuch-show-mode' is better, as large numbers of tags causes the
header lines to wrap frequently, making a collapsed view of the threads
difficult to read (compare [3] and [4] for a quick example).

`notmuch-show-mode' could set `truncate-lines' to `t', but that would
clash with the use of `visual-line-mode', which turns off line
truncation and performs line wrapping.

`visual-line-mode' is useful because some mailers and/or users send
messages with very long lines. Luckily the patch to enable more cleaning
of text/plain parts[5] by default means that this would be less of a
problem, as most (all?) such messages would have their lines wrapped by
coolj.

There is no patch to remove `visual-line-mode' and set `truncate-lines'
yet, but it's simple for an interested developer to try.

Hence this is really a plea to consider these various patches (and the
resulting behaviour and appearance) together, even though they might not
immediately appear to be related.

Footnotes: 
[1]  "You're never too young to learn to use emacs."
[2]  id:"1325160490-23472-1-git-send-email-dme at dme.org"
[3]  http://dme.org/data/images/2011-12-27-114014_958x1179_scrot.png
[4]  http://dme.org/data/images/2011-12-27-114028_958x1179_scrot.png
[5]  id:"1324987225-3067-1-git-send-email-dme at dme.org"

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