Flat search and threaded views

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Thu, Aug 04 2016, Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> wrote:
>> I'd like to jump directly to the first unread message (and in detail, to
>> the first message that actually matches the query!). It's really not
>> great to have to find what message matched the query, especially for
>> long-running threads.
>
> For me, hitting RET in search does show the first matching message in
> the thread.

Ok, I see now.

The problem is that the search I've built includes both existing
messages and unread ones (with a buffer of a day). So even though I get
a new (unread) message, some existing messages in the thread also match.
When reading a new thread started within the day, all messages match.

So I have a different question:

Can I customize how to jump within a thread? I understand 'unread' is
nothing special and I'd like to keep it that way. So I'd like a quick
way to navigate within a thread to skip to messages matching a certain
tag (ie: unread).

With that, I could setup a hook in notmuch-show to improve the behavior
without making unread special.

> The idea is that the unread tag gets dropped when the cursor visits the
> region of an expanded message, in an approximation of when the user has
> actually read the message. We spent quite a bit of time on this, and at
> least I like this behaviour very much, especially with the red
> overstrike on the unread tag in the buffer.

I've seen this, but it wasn't clear how it was working. I see now the
mechanism, but I need a convenient way to jump to tags in a show buffer.

I have to say, as Matt experienced, I wasn't sure how messages where
expanded until I read that message.

> I suppose we could use a feature to tag matching messages from the
> search view and expanded messages from the show view. You can of course
> do this on the command-line.

You mean 'notmuch tag'? Isn't this what '*' would do?

>> Is there a way to sort the search (either tree/search) by subject or
>> by author? Rarely useful, but it doesn't seem possible.
>
> I don't think so.

I also didn't see a way to do that from the command line.