Re: searching

[Stephen Adler <adler bnl gov>]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 05:03:47PM -0800, Matthew Guenther wrote:
> 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!  
> 

Would you recommend another gui based mail interface which runs under
linux?

> > 
> > 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.
> 

I tried that, but somehow that didn't seem to work. I'll play with
that later today....

> >   -- 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.  
> 

PITA? What ever is done, it would be good to give the user the ability
to enter the name of the folder. for example, I want to put mail 982
in my inbox into my folder llwi. llwi is just 4 characters of typing
while trying to scroll through 300 or so folders of which 50 or so
start with the letter li (as in linux) which looks very much like llwi
is hard to do. I'm looking at this from the users perspective....


> > 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.  

I agree, if there are fixes to the foundations for balsa which will
fix this, its best for the correct fix to be put in place. For now, I'll
just have to wait for the itanium systems to come out. I'm running
balsa on a dual 733Mhz PC with .5 gigs of memory, and it still takes
many minutes to render a very long e-mail (1000 or so lines....)
In the end, even after gtk 2.0 comes out, if it still takes several
minutes to render a large text file, (even on my 733Mhz dual), then
I think optimization will be needed....

BTW, I've got a bug report.

I tried spell checking an e-mail and I got a pop up window reading
that it could not load the aspell module. The odd bit is that I have
balsa configured to use ispell. Let me know if there is anything I
can do to fix this.

Cheers. Steve.

P.S. I guess you can tell I've reverted back to mutt....