[PATCH] emacs-show: open excluded matches if no other matches

[Jani Nikula]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:20:52 +0300, Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12 2012, Jameson Graef Rollins wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Mar 15 2012, Mark Walters <markwalters1009 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Currently emacs show does not open matching but excluded
> >> messages. This is normally the desired behaviour but is probably not
> >> ideal if only excluded messages match. This patch opens all the
> >> matching (necessarily excluded) messages in this case and goes to the
> >> first one.
> >
> > Hi, Mark.  I have tested this patch and it LGTM.  I think this is the
> > behavior we want, since it's no fun to open up a show buffer and have
> > all messages in the thread closed.  That doesn't make much sense.
> 
> I disagree: If I open up a show buffer I'd like to have all messages
> in the thread closed if search terms do not match. But that is my
> opinion and inconsistent with current behaviour.
> 
> (Therefore I already +1:d this patch)
> 
> An example: I have thread of 100 messages and 1 of those is unread.
> Search terms is tag:unread. I enter the thread: 99 messages closed
> and this one open. Now unread is automatically removed. If I go back
> to search view (by pressing q) and re-choose the same thread,
> current behaviour is to open all 100 messages. I'd like to see all
> 100 messages closed.

IIUC this would still show all messages closed. Messages that don't
match will be closed. The change is that if there are messages that
match, but all of them are excluded, then open the messages anyway.

In your example, only if you have *another* message that is both
tag:unread and tag:deleted (or some other excluded tag) it would show up
the second time you enter show view.

I actually think I'd still want the above to show all messages closed,
unless the excluded tag was explicitly specified in the search. The idea
of exclusions is to reduce "noise" in the view, why open them? If you
have those 100 messages in a thread, and you want to see the interesting
(i.e. non-excluded) messages, I'd rather see 0 open if 0 are
interesting, instead of 100 non-interesting if they are all excluded.

Perhaps a function to toggle the open/close of excluded messages would
be a better idea. But then I don't use exclusions ATM, so maybe I just
don't understand, and won't be affected either way. *shrug*.


BR,
Jani.