Moving around Mail with the keyboard alone
Michael Boyle finds Mail frustrating 
to get around in.
He asks:
Why oh Why can’t Apple Mail allow me to navigate with the arrow keys the way NetNewsWire does? The relationship between the feeds pane and each feed’s posts in NNW is so fast and intuitive; whereas there seems to be no relationship between the mailboxes pane and the message panes in Apple Mail.
I am happy to admit that driving NetNewsWire with the keyboard alone is a pleasure.
However, it can also be done in Mail, even if the process is not quite as intuitive.
If you are keyboard-only kind of person, see an earlier Hawk Wings post “Moving around Mail.app using the keyboard“.
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, conversations, keyboard shortcuts, mail.app, NetNewsWire, Productivity, tab keyRelated posts
March 4th, 2007 at 2:39 am
If the author of the script is searching for a name, Might I suggest “Zoomba” a play on roomba (ie automatic vacuuming) and making things go faster.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:09 am
If Apple (or some plugin author) would have a dint of historical conscience, Mail would recognize single key shortcuts where no other keyboard input is accepted anyway (especially the message list), like: “g” for “Get new mail”, “c” for “catchup” (mark all as read), “n” for “next unread mail”, “p” for “previous unread mail”, “m” for “compose new mail”, “r” for “reply”, “d” for “delete”, “m” or “#” for “mark” (select), “j” for “junk” and so on. Every honest mail app under the sun did something like that for ages.
When you’re dealing with mail, which is mainly text, you have your hands on the keyboard and just pressing single keys to process your mail is the most efficient way to do that. I’m trying to get used to Mail for a month now and *still* I’m between three and ten times slower in munching through my mail than with Gnus (in Emacs) or mutt. OK, Mail has its own advantages, but its keyboard handling is pathetic. I haven’t had for ages that feeling of email being a nuisance robbing my time — Mail.app gave it back to me.
Hey, plugin authors: Attack that problem and you’ll gain a *lot* of fans. Oh, and add a way to hide boring mail and mailboxes (where “boring” means “read and not flagged” mails, resp. mailboxes containing nothing but read and unflagged mail).
Really, in Gnus I sit down in the morning, nursing a cup of coffee and hit the “n” key reading my new mail across all mailboxes, using “!” to flag messages for handling it later as I go. In Mail, I click here and there and there and constantly getting lost in old stuff. Pathetic. Yes, I can set up a “smart” mailbox to show me only unread mail, but then I don’t know in which folder it actually ended up in, and to flag it, I have to press shift-command-L, which I can’t do with one hand. And to limit the view to only unread mail, I have to switch back and forth to/from another mailbox, whereas in Gnus I just hit “x”.