On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:38:59 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 3/14/14, 2:12 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Friday, 14 March 2014 at 09:03:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
As of this very moment, my NNTP client (Thunderbird) shows
there are 5
messages unread in the left treeview
(http://imgur.com/KHnjcnU), and
displays in a simple list all 223871 messages ever posted in
digitalmars.D with the most recent 5 messages at the top and
in bold
text (http://imgur.com/uJ2UdzA). As I select each of those
unread
messages, their bold disappears (they become read). If I get
bored and
want to mark all news as read, there's a button that does
that (or I
could select some and mark as read etc).
I use threaded views for e.g. github discussions because once
a pull
is merged, I archive them all in one shot. But a flat view is
a very
simple and effective way of staying abreast of what's going
on in the
forum. Again, I feel I'm missing something given that I'm the
only one
asking for such.
In the horizontal-split mode, you can press the space bar to
jump to the
next unread message. Does that help? Or is it imperative that
messages
are displayed chronologically, without threading?
Nothing is really imperative; I'm not asking for features here
as much as pointing out what my patterns are. The horizontal
split view is pretty nice, I'll use it whenever I don't have my
mail client with me. I could probably get used to it but I
prefer a flat view.
I use the Webforum in basic mode and it fits my needs as a silent
reader very well, but there is one disturbing thing.
Every time a context (subtree) switch takes place in a discussion
in the same thread, one needs to read text which was already read
just to get the right context.
This is in my opinion very time consuming and exhausting even if
you just need to read a few words of the parent post. It's also
very much dependent on the authors choice of quoting text.
So I have thought a bit about an improvement.
Wouldn't it be nice if there is a mixed mode view which is quite
similar to the horizontal-split view but adds the time sorted
linear basic thread list view above the thread tree view on the
left side.
If no thread is selected in the basic view, the tree view will be
empty because it displays just the selected thread from the basic
view.
If one clicks on the 'N new' link in the basic view, the first
(in time) unread message will be selected in the tree view (now
displaying the entire conversation thread tree) and on the right
side of the split the message is displayed.
The switch to the other unread messages in the thread works in a
context first manner instead of a time based one. This way one
has much fewer context switches which boosts up reading
performance and it's less stressful for the mind. (Let's call it
Zen-View because of this :-))
If one subtree of unread messages is finished the next unread
subtree is selected by time again.
One has also the possibility to skip entire threads via the basic
view. With a nice user interface and additional keyboard
shortcuts this could probably be a nice addition/change to the
existing workflows.
The problem that one post might include answers to different
contexts exists, but IIRC this is quite uncommon and shouldn't be
done anyway. Maybe this new view leads to even nicer quoting
hierarchies.
Thomas
