[MlMt] Modal two pane layout?

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 4 Apr 2012, at 15:23, Emory L. wrote:

>> Is the above use of colon the default quotation style used by Alpine? 
>> I would consider it highly non-standard (correct me if I'm wrong) and 
>> kind of harmful :-)
>
> pine/alpine/re-alpine let the user select a quote indicator.  I don't 
> know that it's non-standard, but differentiating quotes was 
> historically a viable method of keeping track of extended 
> conversations via email/newsgroups.
>
> If you've got some glue that expects '>' I'd find that more weird, 
> personally ;)

Any code relying on identifying the number of quote levels relies on 
being able to parse prefixed quote indicators. Obviously, arbitrary 
quote indicators makes this impossible. In MailMate this breaks coloring 
of quote levels when displaying messages and editing messages, and it 
breaks the shortcuts for increasing and decreasing quote levels. And 
probably more than that.

I understand the historical usage, but I believe it was/is a bad 
solution to the problem of keeping track of extended conversations. The 
receiving email application should be in charge of how a message is 
displayed. In MailMate, vertical bars and colored text is used (by 
default), but other email clients could use a mix of `:` and `>` if 
preferred. Just my personal opinion (which makes it the opinion of 
MailMate as well) :-)

>> Noted. I can at least look into if I can easily make some kind of 
>> toggle between the two modes (list mode and message mode).
>
> The way I use mutt is with a mailbox preview [1] and I've found 
> *pine's method somewhat limiting because of that.

I'll end up with 100 different layouts in order to satisfy everybody ;-)

> Is it possible Baron that using the keybinding facility in MailMate 
> you could get more comfortable with at least how navigation and common 
> commands are used?

I've also looked into mode-based layouts in MailMate just because I 
couldn't let it go. More specifically, I've just introduced a new layout 
class which can be used to define a set of alternative views which can 
the be cycled using a keyboard shortcut. A working example is something 
like what Baron needs, i.e., a shortcut key can be used to toggle 
between a mailbox/message list mode and a message mode. Experimental but 
it might be usable in the next update.

-- 
Benny