Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!odin!pcg
From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: Improving mailbox browsing and curses mode
Message-ID: <PCG.90Jun28112634@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk>
Date: 28 Jun 90 10:26:34 GMT
Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP
Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru
Lines: 40


I am tempted of switching to MUSH from ELM, but there two things that I
think should be addressed, and one that could; first the important two:

1) Copying the mailbox to a temporary location should be done only when
the mailbox is closed, not when it is opened (unless it is the system
mailbox); at the very least there should be an option to allow this.
The rationale is that by far my greatest use of mailers is to browse
thru large (hundreds of messages and of kilobytes) archive mailboxes I
have, and I rarely do modifications, but then when I do I'd rather not
have to decide it beforehand and omit the 'read-only' option.

2) Curses mode should be redone, or at least improved in two ways:

	2.A) It  should use *two* windows, a fixed one as of now, and a
	scrolling one for user interaction. Currently user interaction
	just dirties the screen; some care has been taken to make this
	happen relatively rarely, but still screen redraws are painful
	and confusing (and no, I don't like the idea of piping
	everything thru a pager, as this would still require a lot of
	screen redraws.

	2.B) When the mailbox is opened all header lines (or at least
	those displayed in the current screen page) should be
	precomputed and kept in an array.  An option should be
	available to indicate the current line with a marker and not
	reverse video, as this would also save the need to rewrite the
	line to the screen. Now whenever one moves to a new line it is
	recomputed from the header (which consumes a lot of CPU time)
	and then rewritten to the screen. When one changes screen page,
	all header lines in it are recomputed as well. All this makes
	browsing thru a mailbox terribly inefficient.

The optional change I would like to see is for MUSH to be split into a
mailbox browser and a message sender components. I almost never use them
together, except when I am replying, and this happens rarely.
--
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk