On Tuesday 11 January 2000 Steve Lamb wrote:
> Tuesday, January 11, 2000, 5:14:26 AM, John wrote:
>> Or auto-completion of header lines, integration of the Address Book
>> into header lines.
> Incorrect, these are still a part of TB! and are editable there. See
> PMMail.
I often alter these headers in the middle of message composition. This
is convenient to do with a built-in (or tightly coupled) editor, less
so with a completely external editor.
>> Another point: sending a freshly composed email now becomes a two-stage
>> process. You first have to save&exit the editor, then tell The Bat! how you
>> want to send (Send Now, Queue in Outbox, Save Draft, Abort).
> Incorrect again. Mutt can be configured to send once the text editor is
> closed if you so desire. TB! can be made to do the same.
So it goes out the door as soon as I close the editor. Great. At the
moment the last thing I do is decide where the message will go (which
often means to the trash!), in one step, and this is how I would like
it to stay. Again, it needs very tight editor integration to do this
with an external editor.
>> Integration of email specific functions into the editing environment
>> is a powerful feature which I would not want to lose. On the other
>> hand, there are many aspects of the The Bat!'s editor which I would
>> like to see improved.
> Then get the editor author to add those email specific items.
Ah, I'll just get them added to Notepad. Won't be a minute!
This really isn't practical in general. The only realistic way to
customize an editor so is for the editor itself to have very powerful
scripting facilities. Which narrows the market immensely. I know
UltraEdit's scripting is not powerful enough. Notepad has no scripting
at all. Emacs is the obvious example, but that's huge and would have
to be run in emacsserver mode, and even then it's just not my
favourite editor even though I'm quite comfortable using it when
necessary. Word's scripting facilities are probably just about
powerful to do this, but there's no way I'm using Word for composing
email!
In short, the built-in editor should stay, but I think having the
option of an external editor would be useful to some. Unfortunately
for them, under the Windows environment the choice of editors that
this would work with is limited to the very dumb (pure SDI editors
like Notepad) or the very complex (editors with powerful scripting
support like emacs or Word). Editors which are MDI or FDI (? I believe
FDI is the term for application such as (Internet) Explorer which run
as a single process, but have multiple top-level windows), and which
do not support sufficient scripting to allow an emacs-like server mode
to be implemented will be unworkable.
PS In case anyone doesn't know, or had wondered what I meant when I
mentioned it above, the emacs server mode supports this sort of
functionality under UNIX. Emacs is a huge program and starting and
stopping a new instance for each email would be slow and a bad
resource hog. So instead you run the Emacs program itself once, and
set your external email editor to be a tiny program called
emacsclient. When passed a filename it forwards the open request on to
the main emacs program for editing there. It does not exit until emacs
has informed it that the editing session on that single file has
finished, therefore avoiding having to close the whole editor to
proceed in the mailer. This is a good solution to the problem and one
that stands a much better chance of getting included (with the right
prodding) in Your Favourite Editor. And if your editor supports a
sufficient powerful scripting facility, you can even implement it by
hand without hassling the editor authors (you could possibly even
implement multiple exit modes for "Send Now", "Save Draft" etc.)
John
--
you gave me something that i could touch in a world where i'd had too much
something i could feel with my broken hands full of lost ideals but soon i'm
returning to you my friend and we'll go where the rivers end in the silver sea
and i'll carry you if you carry me
--
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