Sorting & grouping

[Leonard Lausen]

There have been some previous discussions about introducing more sorting
options: id:***@jb55.com id:***@jb55.com

David has also proposed a new sort API in
id:20171210154956.4049-1-***@tethera.net

I believe the initial use-case of William was to sort incoming Github
notifications by project? The reasoning may be that less context
switches are necessary while going through the list of unread threads,
which by default would be sorted by date and may mix the threads of
potentially many projects. One workaround would be to issue one search
per project in sequence, but this can quickly become unwieldly as the
number of projects grows.

For this use-case, it seems the notion of "Grouping" results in the
notmuch-search view may be helpful. Consider all Github mails being
tagged with 'software' as well as 'lists/$PROJECT_NAME'. Then, currently
a search for 'tag:software tag:unread' will mix threads from different
projects, sorting all by date. What do you think about adding a 'group'
option that will group mails with the same set of tags (possibly minus a
list of tags to be ignored when grouping) and apply the normal search
order (e.g. by date) within each group? Or is this already possible?

Best regards
Leonard

[William Casarin]

What do you think about adding a 'group' option that will group mails
with the same set of tags (possibly minus a list of tags to be ignored
when grouping) and apply the normal search.

Hmm. I think could be simplified by sorting by a specific tag, and then
by date, etc

Once sorted by a tag, grouping could be a UI thing. Clients would be
able to create visual groupings once they know what tag they are sorting on.

Cheers,
Will