Collapsed state

[Ian Zimmerman]

Hello, I like to start reading my mail with old threads collapsed.
Unfortunately I am finding no reliable way to achieve that.

For a long time, I just had something like this:

folder-hook .* "exec collapse-all current-middle"

and it worked fine - but that was when I started mutt always in the same
way, namely in a fresh terminal emulator window. I have just switched
to a different Linux distribution and a different desktop, and now I
sometimes need to do it that way, but also sometimes in a "tab" of an
existing emulator window. Curiously, mutt behaves differently in these
two cases. It starts collapsed in a tab, but expanded in a new window.

I could work around it if I had either a command to reach a known
collapsing state, or a way of knowing the present state, but alas, I
seem to have neither: <collapse-all> is a toggle command, and I can find
no variable or anything to tell me if mutt is presently collapsed or
expanded.

Do you know of a way out of this frustrating situation?