Re: Putting important stuff exclusively in the subject [was: is it imminent that bookworm becomes stable?]
On Tue 25 Apr 2023 at 15:18:21 (+0200), Christoph Brinkhaus wrote:
> Am Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:07:07AM -0400 schrieb Greg Wooledge:
> > On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 12:39:45AM -0700, dmacdoug wrote:
> > > There are a large number of ways to read messages from the list. I happen
> > > to use Mutt and so I see a list of senders, subject lines, etc. Once I
> > > highlight a certain line and hit enter, I see the message, and 99% of the
> > > time I read a coherent message or question, but occasionally it I might read
> > > something like "i always use stable, Thanks!" and I wonder what that means.
> > > The subject line is now buried among about 8 or 10 header lines at the top
> > > and I need to search through them if, per chance, the real question might be
> > > there.
> >
> > Yes, this is exactly my experience also. Mutt has a "thread view"
> > screen, and a "message view" screen. The "thread view" screen shows
> > you the sender, date, and Subject (truncated). Once you select the
> > first unread message from the "thread view" screen, you go into the
> > "message view" screen, where you see a selected subset of the headers,
> > and then the body. You might or might not remember the Subject that
> > was shown on the previous screen. You might or might not pay attention
> > to the Subject header among all the other headers that are shown.
> Yes, I think in
> http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#concept-screens-and-menus
> the "thread view" is called "index" and the "message view" is called
> "pager". Your naming is more clear :-).
Type o f and your "thread view" is no longer clear, which is why the
documentation uses the neutral term "index", which can be sorted by
Date/Frm/Recv/Subj/tO/Thread/Unsort/siZe/sCore/sPam/Label.
> > But then the interesting bit happens once you've read that first message.
> > When you mark it for deletion, you immediately move to the next message.
> > You DON'T go back to the "thread view" screen. You just see the next
> > message, and you can read that and mark it for deletion, and then you see
> > the third message, and so on.
> Yes, this is annoying. There are two things to countermeasure that
> by configuration in the users muttrc file.
>
> 1. Do not hide the "thread view" when being in the "message view".
> set pager_index_lines=6
> On your installation it seems to be 0. In the example you will see
> five lines of the "thread view" plus a header line. On my installation
> the tiny "thread view" appears on top of the bigger "message view".
I used to do that at work, with a second screen turned on its side
to view a portrait aspect. Nowadays, with a conventional landscape
screen and larger fonts (weakening eyesight), there isn't enough
real estate to allow for a thread view at the top. I prefer to see
more of the message content in one view.
> 2. Include the Subject in the output of the shown message
> You can include or ignore fields of the header to the information
> shown at the top of the message. Example lines are below.
> ignore Content-Type User-Agent X-Mailer
> unignore From Subject Message-Id
ignore * is useful for ignoring everything, so that you get
just the fields that you unignore.
But there's no easy way to make the first paragraph coherent
once it's been beheaded. Sure, this OP was trivial, and gained
nothing from the message body, but in a serious technical post,
you want the opening statement to be a cohernt whole.
Cheers,
David.
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