doc/emacs: add discussion about notmuch-show performance.

[notmuch] / doc / notmuch-emacs.rst

diff --git a/doc/notmuch-emacs.rst b/doc/notmuch-emacs.rst
index ec7dee78ac80867b345f412e4667af14825fbc8a..14d189c102839549d399dd6e2459459fa942faff 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/notmuch-emacs.rst
+++ b/doc/notmuch-emacs.rst
@@ -46,8 +46,47 @@ a mouse or by positioning the cursor and pressing ``<return>``
 |                    Customize Notmuch or this page.
 
 You can change the overall appearance of the notmuch-hello screen by
-customizing the variable :index:`notmuch-hello-sections`.
+customizing the variables
 
+:index:`notmuch-hello-sections`
+       |docstring::notmuch-hello-sections|
+
+:index:`notmuch-hello-thousands-separator`
+       |docstring::notmuch-hello-thousands-separator|
+
+:index:`notmuch-show-logo`
+       |docstring::notmuch-show-logo|
+
+:index:`!notmuch-column-control`
+    Controls the number of columns for saved searches/tags in notmuch view.
+
+    This variable has three potential types of values:
+
+    .. describe:: t
+
+       Automatically calculate the number of columns possible based
+       on the tags to be shown and the window width.
+
+    .. describe:: integer <n>
+
+       A lower bound on the number of characters that will
+       be used to display each column.
+
+    .. describe:: float <f>
+
+       A fraction of the window width that is the lower bound on the
+       number of characters that should be used for each column.
+
+    So:
+
+    - if you would like two columns of tags, set this to 0.5.
+
+    - if you would like a single column of tags, set this to 1.0.
+
+    - if you would like tags to be 30 characters wide, set this to 30.
+
+    - if you don't want to worry about all of this nonsense, leave
+      this set to `t`.
 
 
 notmuch-hello key bindings
@@ -227,7 +266,7 @@ pressing RET after positioning the cursor on a hidden part.
 ``?``
     Display full set of key bindings
 
-Display of messages can be controlled by the following variables
+Display of messages can be controlled by the following variables; see also :ref:`show-large`.
 
 :index:`notmuch-message-headers`
        |docstring::notmuch-message-headers|
@@ -259,6 +298,36 @@ Display of messages can be controlled by the following variables
            (t
             (list "text/html" "multipart/related")))))
 
+.. _show-large:
+
+Dealing with large messages and threads
+---------------------------------------
+
+If you are finding :ref:`notmuch-show` is annoyingly slow displaying
+large messages, you can customize
+:index:`notmuch-show-max-text-part-size`.  If you want to speed up the
+display of large threads (with or without large messages), there are
+several options.  First, you can display the same query in one of the
+other modes. :ref:`notmuch-unthreaded` is the most robust for
+extremely large queries, but :ref:`notmuch-tree` is also be faster
+than :ref:`notmuch-show` in general, since it only renders a single
+message a time. If you prefer to stay with the rendered thread
+("conversation") view of :ref:`notmuch-show`, you can customize the
+variables :index:`notmuch-show-depth-limit`,
+:index:`notmuch-show-height-limit` and
+:index:`notmuch-show-max-text-part-size` to limit the amount of
+rendering done initially. Note that these limits are implicitly
+*OR*-ed together, and combinations might have surprising effects.
+
+:index:`notmuch-show-depth-limit`
+       |docstring::notmuch-show-depth-limit|
+
+:index:`notmuch-show-height-limit`
+       |docstring::notmuch-show-height-limit|
+
+:index:`notmuch-show-max-text-part-size`
+       |docstring::notmuch-show-max-text-part-size|
+
 .. _show-copy:
 
 Copy to kill-ring
@@ -454,6 +523,15 @@ Sending Mail
        :code:`compose-mail`.  To use ``notmuch`` for this, customize this
        variable to the symbol :code:`notmuch-user-agent`.
 
+:index:`message-dont-reply-to-names`
+
+       When composing mail replies, Emacs's message mode uses the
+       variable :code:`message-dont-reply-to-names` to exclude
+       recipients matching a given collection of regular expressions
+       or satisfying an arbitrary predicate.  Notmuch's MUA inherits
+       this standard mechanism and will honour your customization of
+       this variable.
+
 Init File
 ---------