Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:41:46 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] emacs: add default value to notmuch-search-line-faces
Message-ID: <20120126194146.GG1940@mit.edu>
References: <1327605679-15213-1-git-send-email-jani@nikula.org>
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Quoth Jani Nikula on Jan 26 at  9:21 pm:
> Add default value to notmuch-search-line-faces to show "unread"
> messages in bold, and "flagged" messages in red, to have some visual
> indication of important messages in search results. This should be
> helpful for new users.
> 
> "unread" tag is quite obvious, and handled specially both in the lib
> and emacs ui. "flagged" is synced to maildir F flag in the lib. If one
> syncs the maildir to IMAP, this also translates to corresponding IMAP
> flag. (This is "starred" in GMail and Android.)
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>

While I'm sure this can be bikeshod to death, I do have one legitimate
concern (and one illegitimate).

I completely agree with what you said on IRC, though, that setting
this to non-nil is more about making this capability more discoverable
to new users than trying to come up with the perfect faces.

> ---
>  emacs/notmuch.el |    3 ++-
>  1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/emacs/notmuch.el b/emacs/notmuch.el
> index 6b2c252..551ea9d 100644
> --- a/emacs/notmuch.el
> +++ b/emacs/notmuch.el
> @@ -662,7 +662,8 @@ This function advances the next thread when finished."
>  		  (goto-char (point-min))
>  		  (forward-line (1- notmuch-search-target-line))))))))
>  
> -(defcustom notmuch-search-line-faces nil
> +(defcustom notmuch-search-line-faces '(("unread" :weight bold)

As much as I would like this, many terminals don't visually
distinguish between the default face and the default face in bold.

> +				       ("flagged" :foreground "red"))

Red is pretty universally used to indicate danger or a serious
condition, while "flagged" is simply supposed to draw attention.  I
would say blue as a neutral and distinct indicator, but it also has
poor visibility (I used to use blue, but found that when scanning my
mail, I would habitually skip over flagged messages because they were
dark, which was the opposite of what I wanted).  Personally I've
settled on yellow; it's visually distinct enough to be easily
noticeable and bright enough that I don't skip over it, though it
obviously wouldn't work on a light background.

>    "Tag/face mapping for line highlighting in notmuch-search.
>  
>  Here is an example of how to color search results based on tags.