Re: [Evolution] have you seen this message?

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

This delay-before-marking-it-read thing sounds super confusing and
nonintuitive to me (Principle of Least Astonismment and all that.)

In the message list window:
Up-arrow and Down-arrow should select a message and mark it read.
Space should scroll the selected message, and if at the bottom of
the message, should select the next message and mark it read.

In the message body window:
Space should do the same thing.
PgUp and PgDown should scroll only.
Up and Down should scroll (by lines) only.

Making it so that in the message list window, Up and Down changed which
message was highlighted but didn't select it (requiring RET) would be
intuitive, but inconvenient, so I wouldn't want that.

At Netscape there was also much debate about whether hitting Space when
at the end of the last message in a newsgroup should open the next
newsgroup in the list; and whether opening a folder/newsgroup should
automatically select (and thus, mark as read) the first unread message.
In 3.x, we did the latter and did not do the former, but Confusicator
might have changed that, I don't remember.

This is the part where one of you says "make it a preference!" but try
and imagine how bulky and confusing that preferences page is going to be
(there are probably dozens of options here to micromanage), and how
seldom a real-world non-hacker user is ever going to touch it.  Don't
make it a preference, that's a cop-out: instead take the time to figure
out what the right thing is, and do that.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/