John Dennis wrote:
On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 13:52 -0500, Charles McNulty wrote:
short description: RC now acts like Thunderbird
FWIW, Thunderbird is not the perfect model of a MUA user interface, be
careful about slavish emulation of its interface, finding a common model
between the major MUA's will provide greatest ease of use for the
majority of users (the majority of which are probably Outlook users and
are not familiar with Thunderbird)
Agreed, and I try to be. When I'm tweaking this type of stuff I always
check to see what Outlook 2003, OE and Thunderbird do.
From a UI perspective having the delete command perform an undelete
operation depending on context seems confusing. Delete should delete,
period IMHO.
Agreed
Also, I thought once a message was deleted its entry in the list was
going to be removed (if "hide deleted messages" == True, a common MUA
behavior), if so then you don't even have an object to toggle the
delete/undelete on, one more reason to not confuse what the delete keys
does.
The removal from the list is dependent on two factors: the presence of a
defined Trash folder ($rcmail_config['trash_mbox']) and the option:
$rcmail_config['flag_for_deletion']. I had talked briefly about
supporting hidden marked-for-deletion messages and even implemented
support for it, but in the end the code was just too ugly for me to
stomach committing it.
However, if the delete key only ever deletes its a very simple mental
model for the user, everything in my selection will be marked for
deletion (the fact some items are already marked is irrelevant, they
just get the deleted attribute reapplied, which would be what most users
expect).
And this is what I implemented with the exception being that if *all* of
the messages are already deleted it undeletes them all. Sorry for not
being clear on that point.
Rather than having delete toggle between delete and undelete, there
should be a delete command and an undelete command which only does what
it says it's going to do to everything in the selection list (not
toggle, or worse toggle a subset).
The undelete command needs to be available, typically its in the edit
menu or right click popup menu.
I think there is a good reason Outlook never undeletes with the delete
command.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. I think that undeletion with the
delete key is non-intuitive and should be phased out the moment we have
a right-click or edit menu. You can even see the havoc it's causing in
Thunderbird right now by searching bugzilla for undelete.
The problem is that we had no mechanism at all for undeleting messages
en mass. This was a pretty critical flaw that I feel overrides our
shared desire for more sane deletion/undeletion handling. In short, I
just didn't think that we could wait for edit/right click menus for this
feature.
-Charles
