Derek D. Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> This is part of the Unix philosophy, which goes something like, "if
> there's nothing to report, then report nothing." Armed with this
> knowledge, there's really no need for such a message...
I would amend that to say, "If there's no need to report anything,
don't report anything." In this case, there _is_ a need
since there's no feedback _whatsoever_ that Ispell ran. This
isn't true at the command line:
% touch foo
% ispell check foo
% _
Here you can see that Ispell completed because the shell presented
you with a new prompt and a blinking cursor eagerly awaiting
input. And if you're really insecure, you can always check the
return code with "echo $?". When running Ispell from Mutt,
however, you don't have this. You press 'i'. Nothing happens.
You press 'i' again. Nothing happens. "Why isn't Ispell
running?" you think. "What did I break? Were there no errors, or
did it not run?"
With the traditional Ispell program, this isn't an issue since it
will almost always catch a "misspelling" in one of the headers.
With "aspell -e", however, Aspell skips past the message headers.
Feedback is an important element of any user interface, GUI or
text-based, UNIX or not.
Sam [who still thinks this is a flea]
