On Wed, Sep 05, 2007, Alain Bench wrote: > > unfortunately, [pager's <flag-message>] only works for the > > "important" flag > The pager has functions for manipulating many flags: > | flag key function help > |--------------------------------------------------------------------------- > | ! F <flag-message> toggle a message's 'important' flag > | N N <mark-as-new> toggle a message's 'new' flag > | D d <delete-message> delete the current entry > | D u <undelete-message> undelete the current entry > | * t <tag-message> tag the current entry > |---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is quite weird; I learnt over time what the various flags of Mutt were for -- as these are seen in message lists -- and I was happy to manipulate flags via w / W keybindings: I only had to learn about w and W. But now, after 5 years of Mutt's usage, I discover that I should special case the pager with different keybindings: first I can't type the familiar w / W keybindings, second I have to learn one keybinding per flag (instead of a single keybinding), and third the new keybindings toggle flags instead of setting/unsetting them. Perhaps some people find the set of "toggle" keybindings more useful or more practical but I personally like remembering the general purpose w / W keybindings. What I'm requesting is simply consistency of the available keybindings: that w / W should be available and act the same whenever I'm possibly acting on a message. The d, N, u, t, F keybindings act exactly the same in pager and index views, so the principle of least surprise would suggest that w should too. :) > | macro pager <F42> <exit><set-flag>O<display-message> "mark message > Old" > | macro pager <F43> <exit><clear-flag>O<display-message> "mark message > read" > Unfortunately it's not possible to prompt the user in the middle of > a macro. The macro has to embed the response. Thanks! While I trust that this would actually solve my personal configuration issue, how would you feel if you were to explain the w / W keybinding of Mutt to a new user and had to explain that w / W works only in the index and not in the pager and "you have to use other keybindings in the pager or you have to add this configuration snippet"? > Natural, I agree. OTOS this would mean more code. And a longer list > of functions, when we already have so many that users may be lost. I think consistency is more important to end-users. Learning vim is easy because it's consistent. You can easily remember how to delete 12 lines or how to yank 42 lines because you can always combine the number of times you want to do an action with the action keybinding. The same goes for actions on Vim's storage registers or actions on ranges etc. I suppose the amount of additional code is still presumably small as the logic is already present in the index. And wouldn't it be more consistent in the code too if you had to maintain the same per-message functions in index and pager views? -- Loïc Minier
