confusing command for editing draft

[dcbaker]

the use of editnew to edit a draft message is extremely confusing, and not at all obvious. I towuld make much more sense to have editnew always return a new message, ala compose.

I think we should drop editnew alltogether, and just have reply, groupreply, forward, compose, and edit or editdraft

[pazz]

I agree that the whole drafts handling is not really intuitive. The thing is that drafts are nothing else but messages usually stored in a special folder and tagged with "draft". So from notmuch's point of view these are messages like all others. Do you have a cleaner solution?

[dcbaker]

I think what's really confusing about them is that editnew intuitively doesn't open a draft to edit further, it creates a new message. We already have compose for writing a brand new email, so maybe just renaming editnew to editexisting or editdraft? Or does editnew create a new email if there isn't a draft to edit?

[pazz]

Quoting Dylan Baker (2017-04-14 17:48:00)

Does editnew create a new email if there isn't a draft to edit?

No: it works on all mails, as drafts are just specially tagged mails. I always read this command as "edit_as_new", which is exactly what it does. It creates a new mail with this one as template. Maybe there should be an option (default?) to remove the template after sending the new one. I just want to avoid giving the impression that this can be used to edit mails on disk. mails which were sent/received should be considered immutable.

[dcbaker]

ah, the edit_as_new makes more sense now, that's just not how I or my co-worker interpreted the command. I'll think about the draft handling a little more. I think we can do better, but I'm not sure exactly how.

[fnurl]

Hi, was trying to find out how to continue writing a message saved as a draft. The discussion in this thread has led me to understanding that in alot:

• when composing a message you can save it in a folder configured as the "drafts folder"
• there are no drafts in alot, just a folder where unsent messages can be saved without sending them
• what "save draft" actually means is "store this message in this specific maildir folder without sending it"
• users cannot edit existing messages in the maildir
• this means that users cannot "continue" editing a draft, because 1) messages cannot be edited and 2) there are not special "draft type" messages that are excepted from rule 1.
• the way to "continue editing" a draft is to create a new message using the previous message state as a template then either save the new message as a draft or send it, then delete the previous state(s) of the message

Is this correct?

From a user perspective this is really confusing since the use of the term "draft" causes the user to assume certain things. Would it not be better to explicitly explain that alot has no support for drafts. However, you can save a message to a folder called "unsent", then use them as templates when composing a new message.

The default behaviour of the compose command could then be to check if any messages exist in the "unsent" folder and ask the user if he or she would like to use one of them as a template?

Or just have the command "edit-draft" that treats messages in the configured folder as special?

[dcbaker]

I was thinking having a buffer for managing drafts would be pretty useful, then you could see your drafts and just select them to edit. Just a thought so far.

[stevenengler]

I wrote my own patch yesterday for asking the user if they wish to delete the old draft after they create a new one with 'editnew'.

So my workflow is currently to 'reply' on an existing message or 'compose' a new message, then 'save' the draft if I don't want to send it yet. Then I can find the draft later with 'search tag:draft', and edit with 'editnew'. If I 'save' this new draft, my new patch prompts me to delete the old draft (remove from notmuch and delete from disk). To me it doesn't make sense to have multiple revisions of drafts sitting around forever.

If this is a patch you'd be interested in, I can polish it up and submit a PR.

I also think that if you want for new people to adopt alot, it would be good to have some documentation for basic email workflows which aren't very obvious in alot.

[pazz]

Quoting Steven Engler (2018-09-12 22:04:12)

I wrote my own patch yesterday for asking the user if they wish to delete the old draft after they create a new one with 'editnew'. So my workflow is currently to 'reply' on an existing message or 'compose' a new message, then 'save' the draft if I don't want to send it yet. Then I can find the draft later with 'search tag:draft', and edit with 'editnew'. If I 'save' this new draft, my new patch prompts me to delete the old draft (remove from notmuch and delete from disk). To me it doesn't make sense to have multiple revisions of drafts sitting around forever. If this is a patch you'd be interested in, I can polish it up and submit a PR.

This sounds great, yes!

I also think that if you want for new people to adopt alot, it would be good to have some documentation for basic email workflows which aren't very obvious in alot.

Yes. As discussed briefly in #1311, we could have some wiki page to discuss common workflows like this here, and the workaround for inline search there.