A few questions about window behavior

[Greg Hendershott]

I'm a couple days into trying mu4e 0.9.11 and really like it so far!

Some of the window management feels strange to me. So I wanted to ask about a few examples.

1. The window along the entire bottom of the frame created by mu4e-update-mail-and-index seems kind of disruptive. However I tweaked this by rebinding the U keys in all the views to my own wrapper that calls (mu4e-update-mail-and-index t), that is with the optional run-in-background arg.

2. The way that mu4e-headers splits to show messages, seems weird, because I regularly have a 2 column layout already in Emacs and I'd prefer the messages simply to use the other column's window. Is it possible to customize this?  I guess what I want might be a new value for mu4e-split-view, called let's say 'other-window.  Also the y key should work in this case.

3. Finally, my biggest confusion is with *mu4e-main*. If I press q, it is careful to ask me if I really want to quit. And yet, if I merely C-x b and switch to another buffer... *mu4e-main* is silently deleted. Huh?  This behavior really confused me at first. From looking at the Elisp source, I'm still not sure how/why this happening much less how to prevent it.  Any ideas?

I realize these may sound like niggly points (sorry!), but, they're only because I like mu4e enough that I've been trying to use it full-time.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Greg,

On Tuesday Feb 10 2015, Greg Hendershott wrote:

> I'm a couple days into trying mu4e 0.9.11 and really like it so far!
>
> Some of the window management feels strange to me. So I wanted to ask about
> a few examples.
>
> 1. The window along the entire bottom of the frame created by
> mu4e-update-mail-and-index seems kind of disruptive. However I tweaked this
> by rebinding the U keys in all the views to my own wrapper that calls
> (mu4e-update-mail-and-index t), that is with the optional run-in-background
> arg.
>
> 2. The way that mu4e-headers splits to show messages, seems weird, because
> I regularly have a 2 column layout already in Emacs and I'd prefer the
> messages simply to use the other column's window. Is it possible to
> customize this? I guess what I want might be a new value for
> mu4e-split-view, called let's say 'other-window. Also the y key should
> work in this case.

mu4e plays a few tricks with the emacs window-management, so I'm not
sure how easy this would be to accomplish, but it would be worth
experimenting with.

> 3. Finally, my biggest confusion is with *mu4e-main*. If I press q, it is
> careful to ask me if I really want to quit. And yet, if I merely C-x b and

> switch to another buffer... *mu4e-main* is silently delete. Huh? This

> behavior really confused me at first. From looking at the Elisp source, I'm
> still not sure how/why this happening much less how to prevent it. Any
> ideas?

The idea is that you call M-x mu4e which will always take you back to
the main-view and optionally regenerate things based on your settings --
it's not "really" a buffer but rather the output from M-x mu4e.

> I realize these may sound like niggly points (sorry!), but , they're only

> because I like mu4e enough that I've been trying to use it full-time.

No problem -- mu4e is the product of my experiments and the way how I
like to deal with mail, and over time, more features have been added to
optimize use-cases for other people too, and we'll keep on doing that.

Work/travel doesn't allow me as much time as I'd like to spend on
mu/mu4e, but thankfully there are a lot of smart people who suggest
ideas, report problems or even provide patches for them.

Kind regards,
Dirk.


--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema Helsinki, Finland
e:dj...@djcbsoftware.nl w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
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