On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 13:52 -0500, Charles McNulty wrote:
short description: RC now acts like Thunderbird
FWIW, Thunderbird is not the perfect model of a MUA user interface, be careful about slavish emulation of its interface, finding a common model between the major MUA's will provide greatest ease of use for the majority of users (the majority of which are probably Outlook users and are not familiar with Thunderbird)
If you have one message selected pressing delete(key or icon) toggles the deleted status of that message and goes to the next message.
From a UI perspective having the delete command perform an undelete
operation depending on context seems confusing. Delete should delete, period IMHO.
Also, I thought once a message was deleted its entry in the list was going to be removed (if "hide deleted messages" == True, a common MUA behavior), if so then you don't even have an object to toggle the delete/undelete on, one more reason to not confuse what the delete keys does.
If you have multiple messages selected it will undelete them if and only if they are all marked as deleted. If any one of them is not deleted it will mark those messages as deleted and ignore all of the already deleted messages.
Once again, this seems very confusing, the behavior is dependent on an obscure condition most users won't appreciate.
However, if the delete key only ever deletes its a very simple mental model for the user, everything in my selection will be marked for deletion (the fact some items are already marked is irrelevant, they just get the deleted attribute reapplied, which would be what most users expect).
This is different than Outlook/OE which never undeletes with the delete key. The thing is that with those clients you have a right-click menu that allows you to undelete. When RC gets a right-click menu, I would think that it might be preferable to put undelete there rather than following Thunderbird behavior. Or of course it could be an option.
Rather than having delete toggle between delete and undelete, there should be a delete command and an undelete command which only does what it says it's going to do to everything in the selection list (not toggle, or worse toggle a subset).
The undelete command needs to be available, typically its in the edit menu or right click popup menu.
I think there is a good reason Outlook never undeletes with the delete command.