[IDEA] Add albums to playlist

[Nutul]

I'm not sure how to do that but I have no coverart.  Well, accidentally I do as I have the odd jpeg but to the extent it's possible I've disabled it everywhere I can.  Is there an option in moode somewhere to say "no cover art or images anywhere ever"?  There are some large black squares which just say moOde I'd like to get rid of of. (The one at the bottom left on the artists view is really low resolution/quality).

You can chose whether or not to have the album art shown in the albums pane of the TAG VIEW: "m" => Preferences => (Advanced section) Show tagview covers

and in the playback queue: "m" => Preferences => (Playback section) Queue thumbs


P.S.
The squares saying moOde is just the default album art if none is to be found.

It would be nice to make use of some of this space to have more artists/albums - it'd make scrolling through long lists easier.

This is the way the UI currently works, the TAG VIEW (the view you are mentioning here) is split in two horizontally:

TOP: may have 2 or 3 sections, depending on whether you chose to view the genres or not, anyway: (GENRES)  |  ARTISTS  |  ALBUMS
BOTTOM: has two sections: ALBUM-ART  |  album tracks

Refactoring it to suit your wish is not an easy task, involving, among other things, re-testing on many layouts, and possibly making it an option in the preferences...

While I'm rambling, is there an reason why it wouldn't be possible to have the / key used to bring up a search box?

If you need to search in the playing queue, there is a search field just top-left (this searches the play queue only); same for the TAG VIEW, just click on "Library", top-left, and use the same search field. You'll notice also an "Advanced search" option there, which offers, indeed, more complex search criteria (these last two search the whole library)

Finally, when moOde is doing stuff sometimes I see a white box with what looks like a pause and a play icon, and sometimes a cross.  They don't seem to do anything.  Maybe you can pause/resume some operations?

They are notifications; they may look like "they don't do anything", but moOde shows them to let you know what's going on, like loading the library, if it takes a long time, or notifying errors; so if you can be more specific (e.g. include the text you see in such boxes) we can be more exhaustive in our answers.