Threaded Views

• How do I edit/delete or otherwise process multiple messages? For example, I want to edit the labels of multiple messages. It would be nice to have an midnight commander-type ins and * command to select messages.
• editing a label with l doesn't support control-backspace.
• Who the fuck can read black text with a dark blue background? I can barely tell the difference between each message in a thread.
  • On that note, I would only very sparingly use bold colours, but sup has such brightness all over the place.
• When one message is expanded, and I collapse it, my view is shoved down.
• I view a thread and it's red, green and blue striped.. and has an unreceived message very badly scattered through the red lines. Was this a bad mh-to-Maildir conversion (see converting mh mailboxes to maildir), or is this an issue with sup?
• the striping does not need to be so "loud". It can be every three or perhaps every four lines, like so:

colour1
colour2
colour2
colour2
colour1
colour2
colour2
colour2
colour1

• A collapsed thread isn't displayed the way I expect.

- 1 one collapsed message



2 another collapsed message

3 third message
3a expanded message
3b expanded message
3c expanded message

--- 3 third message

- 1 one collapsed message



2 another collapsed message

3 third message

Editing a Message

• ? should only give help for the current context.
• sup does not gracefully deal with the user's editor choice not existing. It must be hand-hacked from ~/.sup/config.yaml I assume. I ended up doing a symbolic link because I was too lazy to look into this.
• how is the editor selected without going through sup-config again? Hack a config file? =/
• s to edit the subject. wth.
• P to save as draft. I would prefer s to save as draft
• I would prefer S or control-enter to send.

Final Thoughts

I've only been working with sup for a short while now, and I hope to discover ways to configure or hack my preferences. I went through most of the new user guide but I have not looked at the sup wiki yet. Bearing this in mind, I do have some first impressions..

The general philosophies are pointed in the right direction, but the implementation is done in the classic misguided UNIX console way. Hotkeys are unintuitive and the interface is clumsy. The right elements are coloured, but with the wrong colours. There are some general oddities like viewing the list of threads and scrolling to the right is only done one character at a time so you must lean on your keyboard for a while to view more.

Configuration is classically UNIX, with stuff stuck in text files. The ~/.sup/config.yaml is plain enough to edit but it would I wonder if there are default configuration options which are left out of there. It's not documented at all within itself, but perhaps the wiki has good notes. There is no user-useful in-program configuration that I can see.

To be honest, I hold up an email/newsreader/whatever client to basic DOS programs. In this case, I would compare sup to Blue Wave which was brilliantly intuitive and had proper drop-down menus and in-program configuration.

In general, sup has one thumb pointed sideways. I doubt it could make me happy without major revisions, but it does deserve a significant amount more research and testing before I can give it the go ahead or give it the finger.