On Wed, 02 May 2012, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 29 2012, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote: >> I haven't really looked at this series yet, but I do have a quick >> high-level question. Why use separate customization variables for the >> colors in search and show mode? Wouldn't it make more sense to set >> the colors just once and use them in both modes? > > I thought about this myself as soon as I read the patch. I think I > would always want the colors to match, so it would make sense to me to > set them in one place. Hi I think both are useful (see my reply to Austin) but having show apply the faces from notmuch-search first seems a good idea. There are a couple of extra reasons why I like the show ones separate. One is that I like to colour headerlines of matching messages to highlight them, but in search mode that would highlight every line. Secondly, I colour some things "negatively" in show mode: for example I show excluded messages in grey. This negative colouring does not make sense for search mode because I would only want to grey out results where all messages were excluded not results where at least one message is excluded. Of course we don't show entirely excluded threads in search, but similar comments apply to say the "replied" tag: I could show those in green (on the basis they are "dealt with") but I would not want a thread coloured green just because I have replied to one message in it. > >> BTW, I like how this clearly distinguishes tags and flags. I wonder >> if we could transition to flags for some information that's current >> shoe-horned into tags but actually represents immutable information >> about a message (attachment, signed, and encrypted or so). > > Yes! As Austin probably remembers, we've discussed this before. I > definitely agree that it makes sense to somehow distinguish "immutable" > information that is a fundamental, unchanging/able property of the > message, and it might be nice to look ahead to that here. In essence I agree: my only concern is can the user search for these immutable things, and what syntax is used there. Best wishes Mark