* On 2007.02.22, in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, * "Brendan Cully" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1.5.15. So, I'd like to hear once again which patches everyone would > like to see in 1.6 (and which patches people object to).
I have a new one recently that I never posted: http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/sw/mutt/patch-1.5.13.dgc.nested_if.1 This is a revision to the older "deepif" patch that allows nested conditionals in format strings. The "deepif" patch is really awful syntactically because it depends on escaping the inner nests of if-else conditions with backslashes, and these expressions quickly become very difficult to formulate without error. The solution to this is a container -- when clearly defining the boundaries of the conditional expression, there's no need to escape nested expressions. "nested_if" appropriates %<...> for this purpose. %<...> is already defined as current time in locale, but realistically it doesn't seem all that useful. (You'd never want it in $index_format. You might want it in $status_format, but mutt's screen redraws are event-driven and not clock-driven anyway, so the current time would usually be incorrect. You wouldn't want it in an attribution. It might be useful under the fmtpipe patch, but with fmtpipe you can render the current time however you like, anyway.) Nonetheless, the change to current behavior is why I never posted it before, and I can appreciate not wanting to change this. But I can't think of any other predictable single-character ascii notations for containing conditionals. (I suppose we could choose something like %<<...>> though.) Example: an index_format could be %5C %Z %[%y%m%d] %-18.18F %<M?<%2M\>&%<H?*%.2H*&%<X?{%2X}&%4c>>> %s ^------------------------------------^ This makes the index show "<%2M>" when a thread is collapsed, or else "*%.2H*" if it's spam, or else "{%2X}" if it has attachments, or else %4c if it's just a regular message. The same notation with the "deepif" patch would involve a dozen backslashes, and it would not even be possible with an unpatched mutt. I've been using this a while, and it seems hardy. I would like to tweak it a bit more, but since we're talking about feature freeze here it seems wise to mention the patch now -- perhaps it could be included as-is, and changes added later. What changes? I would like %<...> to become not just a container for conditionals, but also an arbitrary grouping container. To conjure a simple example, this would allow expressions like "%5.5<%2H %2X>", which would display at least two characters of %H and at least two characters of %X, but constrain the pair to 5 characters in total. This would essentially mean trying to show both %H and %X, but giving priority to %H if it expands to more than 2 characters. -- -D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] NSIT University of Chicago
