Multiple header lines per email.

[cho...@chopps.org‏]

Hi,

MOTIVATION: I have things setup so that opening an http[s] URL opens a
new firefox window. I use a tiling WM so by default this will split my
screen into 1/2 firefox 1/2 emacs. This actually looks really nice still
for viewing the message text and the URL content. What isn't so useful
though is the headers view as it gets 1/2 as many columns so e.g., I
just see Date, From and Mailing List/Mailbox (no subject etc). The same
problem exists if you have more than a few header columns and you use
vertical mu4e-split-view.

PROPOSAL: Many mail apps that support the vertical split view
configuration expand the headers view items to use more than a single
line of text per entry. I think this would work great for mu4e as well.
For both horizontal and vertical split as well. If the columns can't be
displayed mu4e would add a header line per entry until it could
display all the columns.

Does this sound useful? I wonder how hard it would be to implement...

Thanks,
Chris.

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema‏]

I worked on some mobile mailer that implemented something like that;
that worked reasonably well there. Whether the model also works well in
emacs - I don't really know.

It would certainly be _possible_ -- ie. I could imagine describing
headers with a format string, somewhat like what `twittering-mode' does.

However, it wouldn't be very easy to do in mu4e, since it's not just
about the display, but also about all the things you want to _do_ with
messages. I suspect there are quite some assumption baked-in right now
which assume one header per line.

So, I could imagine it would require quite a bit of work; perhaps best
split into some beefed-up `tabulated-list-mode' and mu4e-specifics.

Kind regards,
Dirk.

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