I'm glad to see this topic raised some interest. For me the slow
speed of "folders -fast -recurse" is the biggest drawback of MH.
I like Stuart's idea of restricting folders to non-numeric names.
Seems like this should always be the case, but if people think it
is too restrictive, I wouldn't object to its being an option.
Stuart, I encourage you to integrate your code into folder.c and
contribute it!
Jeff is not the first person to suggest an MH front end should cache
the folders list, but I continue disagree. It is a waste for mh-e,
xmh, and each front-end to contain code to do the caching. This all
belongs in MH itself, where everyone can use it. (Though I suspect
with all the speed enhancements that have been discussed here caching
would no longer be as interesting.)
I do like Jeff's idea of having mh-e compute folder completions on the
fly. (See Jeff, I'm not really picking on you.) That has been on my
list of features to add for a while.
I haven't gotten a good design worked out, though. In addition to
collecting completions for a specific string when the user asks for
them, mh-e also wants to be collecting the entire list as a background
task so eventually everything is there with no delay in offering
completions. What I haven't figured out is how to keep these two jobs
from tripping over each other. You don't ever want to have two
"folders" processes running at the same time.
< Stephen