I realised this week that for some years I have been applying Inbox Zero indiscriminately to all e-mail that I receive, but this does not make sense, and has some downsides.

My version of Inbox Zero works very well when applied to mail addressed directly to me, and for mail to certain mailing lists, where each post to the list might as well be addressed directly to me, in addition to the list. However, I also receive by e-mail the following things to which I now believe Inbox Zero should not be applied:

• discussion lists like debian-devel, notmuch@notmuchmail.org, etc.

• mail to aliases like ftpmaster@debian.org (except when that mail is in reply to mail written by me from that address)

• automated notifications received via Debian team mailing lists, where I’m not solely responsible for the Debian package in question, such as notifications received via the Debian Perl Group’s mailing list

• RSS feed articles supplied by my (years old but still going strong) rss2email cronjob.

I believe that applying Inbox Zero to these sorts of things is not only incorrect but is actually harming my engagement with these mediums. Let us distinguish

1. processing e-mail – this means applying the Inbox Zero decision procedure to incoming messages, at set times during the day (I do it once, around 4pm)

2. browsing and sometimes catching up RSS articles and list mail – looking through unread items, replying if I think I have something useful to say, leaving things for later, and occasionally marking all as read if I’ve not had time for that group of lists lately.

These should be kept apart. The easy case to see is why you shouldn’t apply the browsing/catching up approach to e-mail which should rather be processed – that’s just the original wisdom of Inbox Zero. And clearly you don’t want ever to have to resort to just marking all mail addressed directly to you as read.

What goes wrong, then, if you misapply the processing mentality to e-mail which should, rather, be browsed/caught up? Well, the core of Inbox Zero is deciding whether to read and reply to something right now, add it to your todo list to handle later, or decide the mail cannot be dealt with quickly but is not important enough to go on that todo list. If you apply this to RSS articles and discussion list mail, then the third option is basically ruled out, because almost nothing on mailing lists or on blogs that I follow is important enough to go on my list of Real Tasks. But then you’re faced with either reading the article/post right now, or discarding it. There is no option to leave the item marked as unread and then maybe come back to it, or postpone discarding it until you’ve decided to catch up the group. Applying Inbox Zero to discussion lists and RSS feeds creates a false sense of urgency.

I’ve realised that my implicit response to this has been reluctance to subscribe to new mailing lists and feeds, because I don’t have things set up to allow me to read them in a leisurely way. But then I’m missing out on discussions and writing that might be relevant and beneficial to me if I could only approach them when I’m in a frame of mind other than “time to get my inbox down to zero”.

This also means that subscribing to new mailing lists just in order to post something has an unreasonably high cost: introducing all mail on those lists into my Inbox Zero processing window.

So, what’s needed is to make the virtual folder views which I use to read new mail correspond cleanly to the distinction between mail to be processed and mail to be browsed. I.e. for each virtual folder it should be clear whether mail there is to be processed or to be browsed. Then I can continue to use my processing views once per day, and access the browsing views at leisure. (Indeed, I’ve created a keybinding to cycle through the new browsing views, and another to catch them up.)

As I mentioned, some list mail ought to be processed. For example, I want to process rather than browse the debian-policy mailing list, as one of the Policy Editors. With notmuch, it’s easy to include this mail in the relevant processing views (I’ve long had one processing view for weekdays and another for weekends).

Additionally, I’ve used a bit of Emacs Lisp to create a dynamic “uncategorised unread” view which catches mail to be browsed which (i) doesn’t show up in one of the other virtual folders for mail to be browsed, and (ii) doesn’t show up in one of the processing views. So now subscribing to a mailing list is cheap: mail will end up in the uncategorised view, and I can decide whether to leave it there for a low traffic list; create a new virtual folder for the list (trivial as it’s all just more Emacs Lisp, no actual moving of files required); or unsubscribe.

I’ve been experiencing nostalgia for my time in secondary school when my friends and I had all sorts of interesting stuff flowing into our mailstores, from RSS feeds to each other’s blogs where we’d post both our own content and links elsewhere, RSS feeds to stranger’s blogs, and e-mails sent to each other with links. We didn’t have to worry about processing anything back then, as our e-mail accounts were used for intellectual enrichment but not the completion of tasks. I think I can recapture something of that with my new virtual folders for browsing.

Something I’ve found myself doing as the pandemic rolls on is picking out and (re-)reading through sections of the GNU Emacs manual and the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual. This has got me (too) interested in some of the recent history of Emacs development, and I did some digging into archives of emacs-devel from 2008 (15M mbox) regarding the change to turn Transient Mark mode on by default and set mark-even-if-inactive to true by default in Emacs 23.1.

It’s not always clear which objections to turning on Transient Mark mode by default take into account the mark-even-if-inactive change. I think that turning on Transient Mark mode along with mark-even-if-inactive is a good default. The question that remains is whether the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode are significant enough that experienced Emacs users should consider altering Emacs’ default behaviour to mitigate them. Here’s one popular blog arguing for some mitigations.

How might Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous?

The suggestion is that it makes using the mark for navigation rather than for acting on regions less convenient:

1. setting a mark just so you can jump back to it (i) is a distinct operation you have to think of separately; and (ii) requires two keypresses, C-SPC C-SPC, rather than just one keypress

2. using exchange-point-and-mark activates the region, so to use it for navigation you need to use either C-u C-x C-x or C-x C-x C-g, neither of which are convenient to type, or else it will be difficult to set regions at the place you’ve just jumped to because you’ll already have one active.

There are two other disadvantages that people bring up which I am disregarding. The first is that it makes it harder for new users to learn useful ways in which to use the mark when it’s deactivated. This happened to me, but it can be mitigated without making any behavioural changes to Emacs. The second is that the visual highlighting of the region can be distracting. So far as I can tell, this is only a problem with exchange-point-and-mark, and it’s subsumed by the problem of that command actually activating the region. The rest of the time Emacs’ automatic deactivation of the region seems sufficient.

How might disabling Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous?

When Transient Mark mode is on, many commands will do something usefully different when the mark is active. The number of commands in Emacs which work this way is only going to increase now that Transient Mark mode is the default.

If you disable Transient Mark mode, then to use those features you need to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode. This can be fiddly and/or require a lot of keypresses, depending on exactly where you want to put the region.

Without being able to see the region, it might be harder to know where it is. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for wanting Transient Mark mode to be the default, to avoid confusing new users. I don’t think this is likely to affect experienced Emacs users often, however, and on occasions when more precision is really needed, C-u C-x C-x will make the region visible. So I’m not counting this as a disadvantage.

How might we mitigate these two sets of disadvantages?

Here are the two middle grounds I’m considering.

Mitigation #1: Transient Mark mode, but hack C-x C-x behaviour

(defun spw/exchange-point-and-mark (arg)
  "Exchange point and mark, but reactivate mark a bit less often.

Specifically, invert the meaning of ARG in the case where
Transient Mark mode is on but the region is inactive."
  (interactive "P")
  (exchange-point-and-mark
   (if (and transient-mark-mode (not mark-active))
       (not arg)
     arg)))
(global-set-key [remap exchange-point-and-mark] 'spw/exchange-point-and-mark)

We avoid turning Transient Mark mode off, but mitigate the second of the two disadvantages given above.

I can’t figure out why it was thought to be a good idea to make C-x C-x reactivate the mark and require C-u C-x C-x to use the action of exchanging point and mark as a means of navigation. There needs to a binding to reactivate the mark, but in roughly ten years of having Transient Mark mode turned on, I’ve found that the need to reactivate the mark doesn’t come up often, so the shorter and longer bindings seem the wrong way around. Not sure what I’m missing here.

Mitigation #2: disable Transient Mark mode, but enable it temporarily more often

(setq transient-mark-mode nil)
(defun spw/remap-mark-command (command &optional map)
  "Remap a mark-* command to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode."
  (let* ((cmd (symbol-name command))
         (fun (intern (concat "spw/" cmd)))
         (doc (concat "Call `"
                      cmd
                      "' and temporarily activate Transient Mark mode.")))
    (fset fun `(lambda ()
                 ,doc
                 (interactive)
                 (call-interactively #',command)
                 (activate-mark)))
    (if map
        (define-key map (vector 'remap command) fun)
      (global-set-key (vector 'remap command) fun))))

(dolist (command '(mark-word
                   mark-sexp
                   mark-paragraph
                   mark-defun
                   mark-page
                   mark-whole-buffer
                   rectangle-mark-mode))
  (spw/remap-mark-command command))
(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (spw/remap-mark-command 'org-mark-element org-mode-map)
  (spw/remap-mark-command 'org-mark-subtree org-mode-map))

;; sometimes a key to just activate the mark is wanted
(global-set-key "\M-i" (lambda () (interactive) (activate-mark)))
;; resettle the previous occupant
(global-set-key "\M-I" #'tab-to-tab-stop)

Here we remove both of the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above, and mitigate the main disadvantage of not activating Transient Mark mode by making it more convenient to activate it temporarily.

For example, this enables using C-M-SPC C-M-SPC M-( to wrap the following two function arguments in parentheses. And you can hit M-h a few times to mark some blocks of text or code, then operate on them with commands like M-% and C-/ which behave differently when the region is active.¹

Comparing these mitigations

Both of these mitigations handle the second of the two disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above. What remains, then, is

1. under the effects of mitigation #1, how much of a barrier to using marks for navigational purposes is it to have to press C-SPC C-SPC instead of having a single binding, C-SPC, for all manual mark setting²

2. under the effects of mitigation #2, how much of a barrier to taking advantage of commands which act differently when the region is active is it to have to temporarily enable Transient Mark mode with C-SPC C-SPC, M-i or one of the mark-* commands?

These are unknowns.³ So I’m going to have to experiment, I think, to determine which mitigation to use, if either. In particular, I don’t know whether it’s really significant that setting a mark for navigational purposes and for region marking purposes are distinct operations under mitigation #1.

My plan is to start with mitigation #2 because that has the additional advantage of allowing me to confirm or disconfirm my belief that not being able to see where the region is will only rarely get in my way.

Update 23/Jul/2020: A little less than two months later, mitigation #2 has worked out so well that I do not intend to try out mitigation #1. Transient Mark mode gets activated pretty much whenever it needs to be, mainly by means of M-h and C-M-SPC, and occasionally by C-SPC C-SPC or M-i, without much effort. I’ve been using marks for navigation effectively, except for struggling to set quite enough marks – I keep thinking “time to jump back … oh, once again, I failed to set a mark before coming here.” This seems a surmountable difficulty.