Re: nnimap: editing articles

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

"Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On 11 Feb 2006, jas@extundo.com wrote:
>
>> Gnus' editing functionality assume that if you edit article X, it will
>> be called X after the editing too.  I.e., it doesn't refresh group
>> information, and doesn't understand when the new article is called Y.
>> Perhaps that can be fixed, so that 'e' works.  OTOH, perhaps using 'e'
>> will simply give wrong impressions.  With IMAP, you don't actually
>> edit the article.  Perhaps some command that will download an article,
>> put you into an editing buffer, and have a command, say, C-c C-c
>> "save" it by querying for a destination group (which could be any
>> group) and then save the new article to that group.  This sounds
>> rather useful, actually.  Perhaps this is already possible...
>
> I don't see a problem with using `e' for this.  It's very reasonable,
> and will affect other IMAP clients a little bit by appearing to create
> a new message, but if we set the flags appropriately that won't be
> serious.

Yep, should work fine.  The 'e' command has to be teached about how to
do this though.

> What do you think about the discussion between me and Reiner about
> custom flags for Gnus in general?  Is that something that imap.el and
> nnimap.el can support easily?  Are there any performance issues?

It shouldn't be difficult to add, imap.el can parse them and set them
fine.  It already use client-specific flags for things like gnus-agent
and other Gnus-specific marks.

Since this would be a new user interface, some care could be made so
it would work well with IMAP.  I think it looks like a neat project,
that doesn't require much modifications to existing code (always a
nice property).  I'm not sure what the user interface would look like
though.  Some ideas:

- Summary buffer markup to print user-specific flags.
  - Perhaps it should be optional, i.e., you'll have
    to press some key to make the flags visible.

- Limiting to certain "tags", searching the user flags?
  - Useful to "tag" messages, i.e., project-name or similar.

- Command to add a tag to current or process-marked messages.
  - Could autocomplete on existing names, or allow the user to enter a
    new flag.

- Command to process mark all messages with a certain user-flag?

...