Re: vote on key strokes for spam.el

[pinard@iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard)]

[Ted Zlatanov]

> Right now, spam.el uses M-d to mark an article as spam.  Lars mentioned
> he would like something even shorter.  He suggested 'y' or TAB.
> I would like to suggest '$' or '-' as well, as those are not used
> currently AFAIK.  '$' is nicely mnemonic but requires chording for the
> Shift keystroke.  Feel free to make your own suggestions as well.

I still think `M-d' is a better choice, for a few reasons.  The main one
is that `d' (for usual delete) and `M-d' (for delete-as-spam) are quite
related to one another as implying `d'elete.  Another one is that other
tools, and the Graham paper, suggest `d' and `M-d' with similar semantics.

One sure thing is that Gnus evolution is far from complete, and who knows
which Grand New Feature will not pop into existence, into some future,
that would be worth a new simple key or new key prefix.  We should not
let ourselves go into attributing the few precious remaining simple keys
to the last thing we just wrote, however enthusiastic we may be about it.
Still available keys in Gnus Summary keymap should be allocated with much
reluctance.  A feature has to be really, really, I mean really important
and central, before we give it a simple key.

P.S. - A special word about TAB.  This key (like a few others) has a
kind of pre-determined meaning, and should not be randomly attributed to
features, however important they are.  Here, TAB is often associated to
navigation or completion.  Unless an important command at least suggests
such concepts, we should refrain from attributing TAB to it.

One usage for TAB in Gnus Summary, which I installed locally and which is
much and often useful for me, is moving the cursor from the Summary into
the first clickable reference within the article (Gnus already binds TAB
within the Article buffer for cycling over all references in turn, RET
being usable for activating that reference).  However, I do not remember
having suggested it for inclusion in Gnus: as the TAB key is very precious,
I am not so sure that my suggestion would be appropriate.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard