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author | patrick <p.totzke@ed.ac.uk> | 2011-05-18 15:36:50 +0100 |
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committer | patrick <p.totzke@ed.ac.uk> | 2011-05-18 15:36:50 +0100 |
commit | 122819a4b3a03206b76d34411855d3210a379d42 (patch) | |
tree | a8ce50c7739d9e484de7a38ce85ed1572dfab02d /README | |
parent | 97e147ccf964e992a3074964f2d344f0e8ac798a (diff) |
added readme,todo and small fixes
Diffstat (limited to 'README')
-rw-r--r-- | README | 85 |
1 files changed, 85 insertions, 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +This is a proposal for a terminal gui for notmuch mail, written in python. +Currently, it is more a sketch of a framework, so let me explayin the key ideas here: + +* OOP approach using python +* aim at the look and feel of sup for now +* use libraries whenever possible. + urwid: http://excess.org/urwid/ + mailbox: http://docs.python.org/library/mailbox.html + obviously the cnotmuch bindings: https://bitbucket.org/spaetz/cnotmuch/ + (urwid-satext: http://wiki.goffi.org/wiki/Urwid-satext + +You need the cnotmuch python bindings and urwid to run it. i run it like this +> python ng.py -l debug.log -d debug +and "tail -f debug.log" in another window. See settings.py for global bindings. + +Here is an overview of the current airchitecture. + +ng.ui.UI +contains the main component: it + - handles the urwid.MainLoop that manages the screen etc. + - contains a logging.logger that can be used for log/debug messages like so: ui.logger.info('hello logworld') + - sets up and updates the header/footer/body widgets + - is able to open/close/focus buffers (there's a list ui.buffers of currently known buffers, and a ui.current_buffer, pointing to the focussed one) + - handles global keybindings. see below for more on bindings. + - can apply (and further down the road undo/redo) commands (see command.py) + - should be able to open a prompt/dialogs? for user input. This is still missing + +ng.db.DBManager +is the door to the notmuch index. Currently, it has very limited functionality, but should be able to to this: + - store the connection settings (index path and whether or not we use a read_only connection..) + - two basic moethods for reading from and writing to the index. lets call it dbman.query(querystring) and dbman.update(updatestring). + query will return a notmuch.Query object, i haven't bothered with update so far. + - a method for all interesting operations on the index These will use self.query/update accordingly. See dbman.count_messages for a simple example + +ng.buffer.Buffer +Is used as a baseclass for different types of buffers, or displaymodi if you like. So far there's only a SearchBuffer (might be a bad name) +that displays the result of a search for mailthreads, and a BufferListBuffer, that displays a list of buffers. +Technically, ng.buffer.Buffer inherits from urwid.AttrMap. this is done so that it can be directly be set as the body-part of the +main gui, thereby intercepting (and filter/handle according to local bindings) the keypresses. A Buffer + - is a widget, that can be drawn,focussed etc as all widgets. + - has a pointer to the main ui, a typename, (e.g. searchresults, display single thread, envelope, logmode) and knows how to summaryse itselt. + this is currently done as self.info(), and shoulld probably be self.__str__(). + - knows how to handle local (mode-specific) keybindings (self.bindings see below) + +ng.commands.Command +Again, a baseclass for different commands. A command is an object that represents an atomic action. it will only be +be applied once (and is then stored in a undo-list somewhere). it + - has a typename, that is used to identify a type of command for the command factory + - can be applied using cmd.apply with a fixed interface: I assume we want at least pointers to the main ui and the dbman objects here + - should countain a help-info about what it does (to aumagically create dynamic help-buffers later on) + - should know if its undoable, and if so, implement undo() and redo() + - points to pre and post hooks. This might get tricky with undoable cmds.. The idea is, that a cmd gets applied (see ng.ui.UI.apply_command), + also its pre and posthooks are called if defined. these should have the same signature as cmd.apply(). see settings.hooks for an example. +There's a number of commands i already implemented. each one should be created by the ng.command.factory (which also attaches the hooks) + +ng.widgets +contains the urwid.Widgets i use do draw notmuch objects. There's a Threadline widget for example, that knows how to +present a notmuch.thread object as a textline. Should be pretty self explanatory, definately needs some love. +These inherit from AttrMap, which is not very clean i guess, but they must be "selectable" so that we can use them in a urwid.ListBox +(which displays a list and can focus elements). since ThreadlineWidget is selectable it must include a dummy keypress method. + +ng.hooks +this should later on include methods that look for and call? hooks. +The idea is that a user might define either python callables or +paths to binaries, and ng.hooks.get_hook(hookname) retrieves them so that they can be placed in commands. +This might be a totally stupid idea + +ng.walker +Contains urwid.ListWalker derived classes that implement a listwalker (the content-part of a urwid.ListBox widget) +that dynamically allocates its content. The thing is that if one makes a query for all threads in the index and naively +creating a ng.widgets.ThreadlineWidget for each and placing them in a urwid.Listbox (actually a urwid.SimplieListWalker, and /that/ in a listbox), +one this will potentially eat up your memory and take a long time. So ng.walker.IteratorWalker will dynamically +create its next element from the next element of the iterator. for now, there's a NotmuchIteratorWalker class +that does the same for notmuch's one-time iteratotors. this is almost certainly a bad idea methinks. + +Bindings +Are currently a hash in objects of the classes ng.ui.UI and ng.buffer.Buffer. +Obviously, a key is first handed to the currrent buffer and in case it doesnt handle it, +it will be handeled by the main UI. +Each buffer-subclass comes with its own default local bindings which whi might want to overwrite at some point. +I guess we should have a "map" command that takes a buffertype, a key and something to call. +For now, a key in the binding hash is a string that represents a keypress (urwid style: 'shift j', 'k' etc are valid). +the value is then a pair of (commandtypestring, parameterhash), that is used by the command.factory to instanciate +a command with of tyoe commandtypestring with parameters parameterhash. See self.bindings in ng.buffer.BufferListBuffer +for an example. |