On Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:39:40 -0500, James Vasile <james@hackervisions.org> wrote:
> Is anybody interested in a more mutt-like single-email view with a
> threaded index?  No indenting, no waiting forever for long threads to
> fontify, no wading through a long thread looking for the one email you
> actually want.

Various people have suggested it. No-one has written the code. Do you
want that because you prefer it generally or because you believe it will
be faster?

You can disable the indenting, of course (see
`notmuch-show-indent-messages-width').

Did you spend some time determining that it's the fontification that's
causing things to be slow? There was some analysis which showed that
json.el is not the best performer, but it's more likely to be a
combination of many issues.

You could try the patch set at
id:"1328181833-14988-1-git-send-email-dme@dme.org", which includes some
things that can speed up thread display by showing only the matching
messages.

Last, I've been thinking about lazy insertion of message bodies, such
that non-matching messages will not be inserted and rendered until you
un-hide them. That should improve the rendering speed, but would have
the effect of disabling the current 'isearch can open closed messages'
behaviour.