On Feb 19, 2014, at 12:10 PM, Ken Hornstein <k...@pobox.com> wrote: > I guess I'd want to know what people want to happen when they "show" a > message with some images or PDFs attached to it. Let's figure out what > UI people have in their minds and work from there.
And this alludes to my comments about making the commands a bit more scripting friendly. Not that they aren't, but they could be tuned a bit to make them better. And your comments about the UI lit up a big light bulb, and finally made me realize something that has been nagging me for a long time. And that is how the interactive interface is slowly starting to pick away at the "batch" functionality (for lack of a better word) of the commands. The functionality needed to support friendly interactive use is sometimes at odds with what makes sense for scripting. When you make a given command try to do both interactive and batch well, this tension can result in it doing both poorly. Or at least inconsistently. I suppose one of the things I would give a hard think is in re-evaluating the line between programs intended for scripting and those intended for interactive UI purposes. Once upon a time, exec() was a very expensive system call, thus embedding the 'UI' behaviour into the existing commands made some sense. But today, fork()/exec() and spawn() overhead in the MH environment would be invisible on all but the most grossly underpowered hardware. Maybe it's time to rethink where the UI functionality lives, with a view to creating a new set of commands that become the interactive front end, calling out to the traditional commands to do the back end grunt work. This would allow the non-UI bits to be cleaned up for scripting use. I have no specific ideas about this at the moment; this all just coalesced in my brain a few minutes ago while reading Ken's message. --lyndon
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