Re: more considerations in UI/UX...

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

I'm still digesting this (and the follow-up thread), but all of this
looks really great and exciting.

Eric Wong writes:

> * consistency/familiarity - steal ideas from other software
>   built-in help, auto-pager/color,
>   `q=' is stolen from web search engines,
>   search term prefixes (f:, t:, ...) stolen from mairix
>
>   Stuff I don't know but know other users use: Emacs / Gnus
>
>   notmuch - I've only read the code since Maildir can't scale

I use Gnus for NNTP (a mixture of public-inbox and Gmane stuff).  In the
context of lei, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to borrow from Gnus.

I also use notmuch (via its Emacs interface).  As someone that will
probably write an Emacs interface for lei (as part of piem), an aspect
of notmuch that I'd be grateful to see in lei is a structured output
format for easier parsing and for conveying the thread layout.  `notmuch
show' and `notmuch search' have json and S-expressions.  I wouldn't
expect to see S-expressions coming out of lei :), but perhaps json would
be on the table for `lei show' and `lei query' given that it's planned
for $ls_format.

Just for reference, here's an example of (heavily edited) `notmuch show'
output for this thread:

  $ notmuch show --entire-thread=true --body=false --format=json \
    id:20201215120544.GA8927@dcvr
  [[[
    {"id": "20201215114722.27400-1-e@80x24.org",
     "match": false,
     "excluded": false,
     "filename": ["..."],
     "timestamp": 1608032835,
     "date_relative": "December 15",
     "tags": [],
     "crypto": {},
     "headers": {
       "Subject": "[PATCH/RFC 0/7] lei - Local Email Interface skeleton",
       "From": "Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>",
       "To": "meta@public-inbox.org",
       "Date": "Tue, 15 Dec 2020 11:47:15 +0000"}},
    [[
        {"id": "20201215114722.27400-2-e@80x24.org",
         "match": false,
         "excluded": false,
         "filename": ["..."],
         "timestamp": 1608032836,
         "date_relative": "December 15",
         "tags": [],
         "crypto": {},
         "headers": {
           "Subject": "[PATCH 1/7] daemon: support --daemonize without Net::Server::Daemonize",
           "From": "Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>",
           "To": "meta@public-inbox.org",
           "Date": "Tue, 15 Dec 2020 11:47:16 +0000"}},
        []
      ],
      ...
      [
        {"id": "20201215120544.GA8927@dcvr",
         "match": true,
         "excluded": false,
         "filename": ["..."],
         "timestamp": 1608033944,
         "date_relative": "December 15",
         "tags": [],
         "crypto": {},
         "headers": {
           "Subject": "more considerations in UI/UX...",
           "From": "Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>",
           "To": "meta@public-inbox.org",
           "Date": "Tue, 15 Dec 2020 12:05:44 +0000"}}]]]]]