Hi David,
      
Quoting David Bremner (2013-08-27 02:27:00)
> I'm not sure I understand your goal completely here, but the obvious
> thing UI wise would be
>
>   notmuch search --output=authors --format=(json|text|sexp)  $search_terms
>
> Perhaps you're already aware of this, but alot doesn't use the CLI, so
> that wouldn't be directly helpful to having a new view in alot.

Do you mean, that this output=authors option is already available? Then I'm not
aware. If it is not available it's exactly what I meant. So it would look
something like:

$ notmuch search --output=authors from:Johannes
Johannes Kulick (1234 msgs)
Johannes Doe (123 msgs)
Johannes Mueller (12 msgs)
...

I'd sketch the way to implement it like this:

- add notmuch_authors_t and notmuch_author_t structs
- add a notmuch_database_get_all_authors (notmuch_database_t *db)
- add the functions around that to actually get an option for the ui
- add bindings for the other languages

(- implement the view in the clients)

Cheers,
Johannes

--
uni stuttgart      machine learning and robotics lab
http://ipvs.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/mlr/johannes

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