Re: searching

[Matthew Guenther <mguenthe engr uvic ca>]

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Since my life is now going to depend on Balsa, I'm going to send you
> lots of suggestions to make it eaiser to work. OK?

Wow, I'm not sure if Balsa's ready to be responsible for your life!  

> 
> 1) When I save a message in a folder, the way I do this is by left
> button mouse clicking on the e-mail. This pop's up a menu. At the
> bottom of the menu is a "transfer" button which when highlighted,
> pops up a window with a list of all my 300 or so mail folders.
> I then have to scroll through the 300 mail folders looking for the
> right one.
> 

You can also move stuff using drag and drop, that might be easier.

>   -- Is it possible to just pop open a dialog box with a text entry
>      where I can type in the name of the folder and it transfers the
>      mail to that folder? The window with the list of mail folders
>      is cool, but a bit combersom when you have 300 odd mail folders
>      like I do.
> 

This is probably not too hard to accomplish, but fitting it into the
interface might make things pretty kludgy.  We'd probably have to add
tab-completion or something to make it work well, and we already know what a
PITA that is from the compose window.  

> more suggestions are sure to follow....
> 
> The mail filter is very important, I hope you guys have this at the
> top of your list.
> 

Yeah, we know, I don't think anyone really wants to do it at the moment.  I
might take a crack at it depending on how my RL schedule shapes up next
week.

> Just thought of another suggestion
> 
> 2) I opened an e-mail which had a lot of text. (1000's of lines) and
> it sent balsa into a CPU state trying to do something with all that
> text. I couldn't view the text since blasa froze up. I had to basically
> delete it.
> 
>    -- Is it possible to set a limit on the size of the e-mail to be
>       rendered in the e-mail viewing box. OR have a dialoge box pop
>       up warning that the e-mail is greater than 5000 lines of text or
>       what not and making sure that the user really wants to read such
>       a long e-mail?

Sure we could, but this would be highly machine dependent and hard to set a
good default for.  For you it might be 5000 lines, but on my P166 it's
probably 500.  Also, getting the user to figure out how to set it would just
lead to confusion and lots of irate mail for this list.  Perhaps putting a
progress bar in activity mode in the bottom would be a method of letting
the user know balsa was chugging away at the message.  

IMHO, I don't want to try and compensate for all of the current GtkText's
problems, this is the same reason we don't worry about pixmap themes slowing
down text scrolling.  Gtk 2.0 will be out in not too long, and a re-written
GtkText widget is one of the major goodies.  I would rather wait for the
elegant/expandable solution than attempt the "baling wire and duct tape"
solution now.  

MBG

-- 
Matthew Guenther                     A hermit is a deserter from the army
guentherm@asme.org                   of humanity.
http://www.attcanada.ca/~mguenthe/