[MlMt] Thread Arcs styling options

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 5 Feb 2014, at 16:56, Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> I was curious about the styling options available for Thread Arcs, as 
> I’ve been thinking about ways to enhance the Arcs so they indicate 
> things like which messages are flagged, unread, have attachments, 
> etc., etc.  Is CSS applicable there?

No, it's not an HTML view. It's simple GUI class with its own drawing 
functions. There are some preference values for colors, the angle used 
when an arc leaves a dot, the radius of a dot (not sure that one works), 
and when MailMate should “flatten” lines (hard to explain), but 
there isn't anything adding more information to the thread arcs. A 
tooltip is created using a format string, but this is a bit hard to 
customize (requires a new layout).

But I wouldn't mind replacing this view with something displaying HTML. 
Ideally, MailMate would call an external script with the information 
needed for each message and then the script would generate the HTML to 
be displayed. Input could be something simple like this:

~~~
{
	id = 1;
	toolTip = "Foo, 2 hours ago";
},
{
	id = 8;
	refId = 1;
	toolTip = "Bar, 1 hour ago";
},
{
	id = 10;
	refId = 8;
	toolTip = "Foo, 26 minutes ago";
}
~~~

If it worked this way (or something similar) then it wouldn't be limited 
to thread arcs. Any kind of alternative view of messages would be 
allowed.

I'm just thinking out loud. I wouldn't even be able to implement thread 
arcs in HTML myself. If anyone wants to play with this then I think I 
can create a bundle command which demonstrates how one can generate 
input similar to the above (or something simpler), generate some simple 
HTML, and finally, open the result in a browser.

Slightly off topic: The above is something I had not considered for 
thread arcs, but I often think it would be really cool if scripts were 
created which visualized various statistics about groups of messages 
using, e.g., gnuplot or maybe a graphing tool for HTML. For example, a 
graph showing the number of emails replied per day, or a pie chart of 
top-posters on the MailMate mailing list :-) I'll assist anyone with an 
interest in such visualizations (or even just simple tables).

-- 
Benny
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