TUI: Features and design

[TornaxO7]

I'd like to collect the ideas and stuff about the TUI in this discussion. Feel free to shoutout any idea/suggestion for the TUI and what your expectations are.

[TornaxO7]

@soywod is it possible to pin this somewhere?

[soywod]

Done 😉 nice idea btw!

[dvdsk]

I use neomutt for my mail right now but I would love to switch to (and maybe work on?) a himalaya based backend. Here are some (rough) ideas of what I would like to see.

• It woud be nice if the TUI had a sidebar like neomutt. The items in the side bar could be separate mailboxes/accounts. They could also be the result of user defined scripts, like email folders/labels. All done locally.
• Urls should be clickable even if they span across multiple lines. Urls could even be shortend by default and expanded on keypress? This way they do not take up the entire email if they are extremely long (rather common).
• A config file, could be in .toml or .lua like neovim. Using lua opens up the ability to (in the future) add custom behavior. For example defining lua functions that sort mails into folder. Using lua a user can, instead of a string, have a lua command in the config to set the password (maybe calling a password manager).
• Do not support editing text, this can be left to another program such as: vim, emacs or nano. The default can be picked from the VISUAL or EDITOR env var. The config should expose a way to override the default. This would allow me to set up a separate neovim config for email.
• Fuzzy email search to text (like telescope).
• Smart defaults that adapt to the current context. If I am in mailbox A I want my mail to be signed with sig_a and send from adress_a however in mailbox B these must be different still. For mailboxes C and D I have configured nothing and want the default.

[dvdsk]

It would be quite nice to have new drafts be typed in a split. The upper half of the screen would be some already open email and the lower half a tty with $EDITOR running

[TornaxO7]

Not to get out of the TUI. It is a bit like on the web: I prefer to have my content inside my webpage in an iframe instead of another tab or window.

But this is going to be tricky with the keybindings. How should himalaya know, if your keys, which you're typing are refering to himalaya and not to the editor?

[dvdsk]

Not to get out of the TUI. It is a bit like on the web: I prefer to have my content inside my webpage in an iframe instead of another tab or window.

But this is going to be tricky with the keybindings. How should himalaya know, if your keys, which you're typing are refering to himalaya and not to the editor?

Simplest way is simply to disable the use of the rest of the TUI until the editor is closed. Alternatively you could set up a keybind to escape the editor window (then keys will not be captured by the editor). It needs some thought but the problem has been solved in other TUI with a tty.

[TornaxO7]

Simplest way is simply to disable the use of the rest of the TUI until the editor is closed.

Well, but what is, if you need to read another mail which includes some information which you need for your answer? Should the user open a new himalaya instance?

Alternatively you could set up a keybind to escape the editor window (then keys will not be captured by the editor). It needs some thought but the problem has been solved in other TUI with a tty

I don't know about this... this could be very tricky. You'd have to find another key-binding just for switching between the editor and himalaya. Some people might have only "bad" keybindings left which can be mapped.

[soywod]

Anyway, this remains an idea, if it ends up to be too difficult to implement we can just skip it 😉

[TornaxO7]

About the UI of the TUI:

I was thinking about the following main features for the UI:

• a sidebar (for the different mailboxes)
• tabs (for switching accounts)
• main-list panel (where the mails are listed)
• (optional) a little preview-panel on the right which shows the content of the mail.

But I also though that it might be possible to let the user customize what panel should include what content or even how the layout should be. Some people might prefer to have the different accounts in the sidebar on the left and the mailboxes in the tabs for example.

TL;DR

I could imagine the following layout:

| tab 1| tab 2 | tab 3 |
----------------------------------------------------
|     First panel     | Second panel | Third panel |
|                     |              |             |
|                     |              |             |
|                     |              |             |
|                     |              |             |
---------------------------------------------------|

And the user should be able to set the ratio of the panels and also (probably) their position. For example one panel can be even at the bottom. The user can also decide which panel should include which content.
I don't know if you can actually change the position of the tabs to the side as well or at the bottom, but I can look if it's possible with this.

When reading mails

If you open up a mail, the following UI should be loaded:

| tab 1 | tab 2 | tab 3|
-----------------------|-----------------|
| From:                | - Attachment 1  |
| Subject:             | - Attachment 2  |
| CC:                  | - Attachment 3  |
| Date:                |                 |
-----------------------|-----------------|
| Content of the mail                    |
|                                        |
|                                        |
|                                        |
|                                        |
|                                        |
|----------------------------------------|

Hm...I'm a little bit unsure how we should handle hyperlinks... also heavy html
docs are only partially able to display them in the terminal. I'd suggest here
to open a browser for this which loads the html-mail.

There should also be an option to display all headers in the mail.

Writing a mail

When writing a new mail, the following should be displayed:

| tab 1 | tab 2 | tab 3 |
|----------------------|-Attachments----|
| To:                  |                |
| From:                |                |
| Date: <auto-inserted>|                |
| Subject:             |                |
| CC:                  |                |
| BCC:                 |                |
|----------------------|----------------|
| Content of the mail                   |
|                                       |
|                                       |
|                                       |
|                                       |
|---------------------------------------|

[dvdsk]

Hm...I'm a little bit unsure how we should handle hyperlinks

I would suggest to insert a number next to the hyperlink. On pressing the number the default browser would open that link. The number should have a different color so it can easily be recognized as not part of the mail.

I'd suggest here to open a browser for this which loads the html-mail.

I personally hate html emails. Usually it is enough to recognize the text fields and only show them. Right now I use w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html to show html mails from neomutt.

[TornaxO7]

I would suggest to insert a number next to the hyperlink. On pressing the number the default browser would open that link. The number should have a different color so it can easily be recognized as not part of the mail.

Hm... yes, that could be a solution.

I personally hate html emails. Usually it is enough to recognize the text fields and only show them. Right now I use w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html to show html mails from neomutt.

The problem here is, that w3m just displays them as a text (obviously) and some html mails rely on the correct formatting. At least I had a bad experience with w3m + mails as text...

[dvdsk]

Mmm there is pandoc for converting html to markdown. Then we could show the markdown. Alternatively a library could be written to convert html emails to text. Can you expand on the formatting issues with w3m converted text?

[TornaxO7]

Can you expand on the formatting issues with w3m converted text?

Phew... not really, because I haven't used w3m for a long time now... I think I saw stuff like <tag>dcuedum8e028824539<stuff> in my mail which made it impossible for me to read the content of the mail. After opening it up in the browser, I could finally see the content clearly.

[dvdsk]

Probably best to put this in a config, if lua is used as config users can call w3m, open in a browser, call something else or run type up their own lua code. Default behavior could be open in browser.

[soywod]

Here are my plans for the v0.6.0. It is not directly related to the TUI but let's say it prepares everything around to welcome the TUI (and future frontends) within the best conditions. Please feel free to challenge it #345.