Look, if its really that bad, then dont use it.
I spent considerable time I could have been writing new/improving features answering your email, i dont intend to do that again. On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 04:07, Raider wrote: > On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 04:05, Not Zed wrote: > > I'm a mail hacker, I dont work on the editor, but i'll comment where I > > can. > > ;-) Good enough for me. > > > > My fist complaint (or did I miss something?) is that I want to use > > > another editor than the default. How can this be done? > > It can't. > > Why? > > > You dont seem to have any real reasons why the editor is unusable > > though. Personally i'd like to use emacs, or even vi, but i can't > > *shrug*, its still adequate. > > I'd go for gvim. Which is more flexible and can be even "scripted" to > do what you want. > > Anyway, I didn't say it is unusable. It still has problems. As you > can see mostly aestetic reasons, don't know much about the insides. > > Talking about which... okay, it doesn't know how to use an external > editor. Than are you aware of such a hack? I heard about such a > project but I also heard it makes evolution crash quite often as wel. > > > > And here comes my list of problems with the editor. > > > 1. There's no word wrap setting (not to my knowledge). I'd be grateful > > > if somebody will point me that "missing" option. > > You mean setting the mode to 'normal' or 'preformat'? > > Hmm... from what I see normal means wrapped, preformat means > unwrapped. This isn't enough as it only works for my text and not for > the quoted part. See... yahoo.com for example gives you the full > sentence/phrase/paragraph untill the user pushed newline. For the user > of yahoo.com there's nothing wrong. For me... answering with Evolution > is a real pain as I have to break the text line by line. There are > sittuations (say a long URL) where this shouldn't happen. But that > wrapping feature should be there, should be settable... > > > You mean setting the 'normal' option? > > Okay. How can I set the normal option. All I find is a list where I > can set the fonts for fixed/variable width on screen and on print. Than > the shortcuts... and the spell checking. Where is that "number"? > > > I guess because its changing the text from preformat to 'normal'. Its a > > different paragraph, and its being done in html, so you get an extra > > line becuse you've inserted 'normal' between two 'pre' blocks. > > My text is plain text. My friend's text is also plain text. Do you > mean Evolution does some sort of conversion behind the scenes > text->HTML->text? > > > I know the quoting stuff has been worked on a lot, so i dont know if > > this will change in the future (1.2?). > > Oh. I see. So there's no need to try to file a bug report or > something like that with the quoting. > > > Not really. '>' at the beggining of the original text means a quote. > > It is no longer the original text because you've changed it. You > > wouldn't expect to type '> blah' on a line by itself and have it > > magically changed to a quote, would you? > > There are different types of quotes around. Some use '#'. Others the > first letters of the author's user name than the '>'. Anyway, my point > is if I'm writing a large reply and use that colour part my text isn't > clearly divided into "quotes" and "answers". Meaning if you choose > coloring the usability of the editor decreases. > > > > 6. Breaking lines manually from the quote will show them with the > > > quotation color, although this is false - to the person that will > > > receive that mail from the broken lines, only the first segment will be > > > shown as quote. The rest will be... just text. > > I dont understand what you mean here? > > If you're just sending as text anyway there are no colours. There is no > > quoting. There's only the 'convention' of using '> ' at the begining of > > the line, which isn't any hard and fast, defined 'standard', many > > mailers use other conventions (such as 'INITIALS > ' or 'Name $ '). > > If my friend or receiver if you preffer has say pine, than on his/her > terminal the colors won't work well. And it isn't pine's fault. It is > my fault for being too lazy to format the whole text by hand or > Evolution's fault for not having a smart enough editor. Take Eudora for > example - you can download it from Qualqomm's site in case you have a > working windoze around and play with it (it has a freeware mode as > well). > > Or let me give you an example as English is not my first language and > probaly I can't express myself well enough. > > ------------------------------------ > > > This is a very large quote from somebody who wanted to write a very... > > > ------------------------------------ > > That above is the original text. > Below is what Evolution's editor will do: > > ------------------------------------ > > > This is a very large > quote from somebody who wanted to write a very... > > ------------------------------------- > > Notice how the second line (after my newline) doesn't have the quotation > mark whatever that mark will be in the end... If my friend uses anything > but a plain text reader will have to pay more attention to the text to > see that is what he/she wrote and not my additions. Again... Eudora for > example will do like this (alone, I only add the newline): > > ------------------------------------- > > > This is a very large > > quote from somebody who wanted to write a very... > > -------------------------------------- > > Problem solved in an elegant manner. > > > > 7. As an addition to the previous problem, actually a combination of the > > > previous two, if I manually add the '>' sign to the beginning of the > > > line it will show as normal text and the rest will be as quote. I know, > > > one solution would be to turn this different coloring off. But this > > > doesn't mean that part doesn't need improvement. > > Doesn't sound terribly life threatening to me. Especially when there > > are real bugs to fix. > > Oh... of course. But for about the same type of functionality (or even > more flexibility) I can get mailx... now... we're not getting anywhere > with this type of attitute. > > You said there are real bugs to fix... Hmm... what kind of software is > this? My evolution is labeled 1.0.2. I see 1.0.5 is out. IMHO 1.x > means STABLE. Like in no bugs. Is this some sort of beta like with > microsoft? This means Evolution will get stable at what release? 5.x? > This isn't sarcasm. I'm really curious. Even Mozilla has v1.0.0 rc... > meaning release candidade where the features are fixed than people try > to kill as many bugs as possible... than you have a new rc... and so on > till you sqash them all. > > > Why no names? > > Solved the problem in this new mail - I give names and descriptions ;-) > > > I'd rather it worked the way it does, personally. Its more like a plain > > old editor (e.g. emacs, vi), which is what i'm used to, not some silly > > 'smart' editor which gets in the way of what you're trying to do. > > Hmm... I disagree with you. See... gvim is smart. And you can teach > it a lot of things. Evolution's editor seems smart, pretends to be > smart (spell checking, colors and other things as well) and it isn't > that good. I mean is 1.0.x considered development branch? Else, that > coloring stuff shouldn't be in this release, because it is done half > right. > > > Perhaps you're only sending as text and its recoving from a text > > message, in which case I think it loses most formatting information. > > Although i'm not really sure on this one. > > Well.. it shouldn't. \t should remain \t, \n should remain \n and so > on. This recovery part is extremely useful. But why doesn't it > remember all? Back to gvim - (as well as vim) it remembers formatting > as well. > > > I'm not sure, perhaps this is being worked on too. The quotation stuff > > has been developed lately, as I said above. Again, it doesn't appear to > > be a show-stopper bug. > > What is it doing in the "stable" release. Or is 1.0.x a development > branch? > > > > 11. I see the editor has a hard time with highlighting addresses as > > > well. It highlights even the '>' or the dot that belongs to the end of > > > phrase. > > Sounds like the end of the world to me! > > Sounds like a nuisance. There's no place for sarcasm here IMHO. This > is a serious problem. If the code is that bad it can't handle addresses > right, than don't add it. The viewer's part is okay. The editor's part > is broken. Why is than this feature enabled in the editor as well? > > > So why bother about any of the colouring stuff? It all gets dropped as > > soon as you send it anyway. Like, who really cares what it looks like > > on the screen, just set the quote colour to the same as the text colour > > and be done with it? It seems to be an awful lot of niggling over > > something which doesn't even mean anything. > > Why? Even pine which uses ncurses knows this stuff. > > And I DO CARE how things look on my screen. Or else I won't go that > far and spend time with a wordish editor. Really, your model seems to > me (please correct me if I'm wrong) Outlook. But instead of improving > things the teams seems to try to make a clone and nothing more. Maybe > the aim is a bugless clone, but still, no surface improvements. > Actually a crippled version of Outlook as you miss scripting. > > > You should probably just keep using procmail then. If you use a maildir > > store, evolution works just fine with it. > > My thoughts exactly. Now how do I hack into this beast and make it > pipe the mail it gets into procmail and ignore its filtering code if > possible. Because at this point I'd hate to have my resources wasted > with redundant parts. > > > You *could* enter the rules (you can basically do anything) as complex > > s-expressions, but that isn't documented and liable to change anyway. > > Okay. Sounds good. Can you give me some examples? Or at least point > me some man pages, info pages, web pages, whatever about this? > > What does "liable to change" anyway? That I might lose a night hacking > the XML to find out that if I upgrade the new Evolution will crash? > > > Just stick to procmail I guess. The filters werent' designed for this > > type of mess. You can't implement goto's in the s-expressions either. > > That was an alternative. Quick. Dirty. A hack. From how things are > now I can't make rule 15 that the messages it receives is the result of > rule 10 and not the result of rule 8. This while keeping this primitive > "if all" and "if any" way of grouping. > > > Just use maildir and point evolution to the maildir tree. > > > > You can use mbox trees as well (at least in 1.1), but they're not as > > efficient. > > I have a problem here. With Evolution I don't need to bother with a > mail server and I don't have to bother with fetchmail as well. How can > I make Evolution feed procmail via pipe the messages? Don't tell me > I'll have to reinstall fetchmail and sendmail. > > > We use the timeouts that the operating system gives us for tcp > > connections. Tcp timeouts take a while, and we dont know about them > > till the OS tells us. This is how we 'monitor' the connection. I dont > > think there's any way to do more than this in an portable way, as we are > > abstracted from the hardware by the operating system. > > Okay. So this is one thing to complain some place else. It's good to > know. Can you tell me which developer group is dealing with this > issue? Just in case you know of course. > > > The cancel button might work on the main display, then again it might > > not, i'm not too sure on this one. > > It works. Or the Mandrake team is modifying sources? > > > Well, its because its 'send now', that means 'send now'. It doesn't > > mean 'send when you can'. If you want to do that, you should use 'send > > later', and use the send/receive button. > > Yea. I know that. But make it smarter. The way you put it, the poor > idiot that came with the idea of sent mail and outbox should be fired. > As you can just make one mail folder and set a flag as "sent" "waiting > to be sent" "broken"... > > > It should be launching a background thread to perform the sending > > anyway, not hanging the application. > > I had to kill the app. Because even if I reconnected Evolution was > unable to recover. > > > If it'll make you feel any better from being so upset, here's a flower > > :) > > > > @>-,-`-,--- > > Ah. I see the thorns. > > > You dont click on them. i.e. you can't. You can probably hide them > > from the gui by removing their directories in ~/evolution//local, but > > some parts will still load anyway in certain circumstances. > > I don't want to hide them. This is what I make on windoze. I pretend > not to see all the useless apps that are launched. Over here... why > load them by default? Just because Ximian could put a label "oh, see, > our code is as resource greedy as your Outlook so try your new Itanium > with this to see we're just as slow as our competition"? Strange. Why > load them? > > > This i couldn't agree on more. For some reason the UI 'gods' think that > > its better not to know the email address. I'd like it changed but I > > can't imagine it happening while there are bigger problems to fix. > > Still, its not really the end of the world either, but you could always > > try submitting a patch. > > There are people whom get lost when they see all those chars. They > just rightclick a mail from Johnsey and they send a mail to Johnsey, > thinking of [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a dreadful thought for their hamburger-like > IQ. But there has to be an option lost somewhere. Where the default is > like this, and me and you can just check it and we're back to what we > want/know. > > About the patch: first I don't know I'm that good. I give you credit > for the work you do and I respect you (you said you're one of the > developers). Than... what makes you sure my patch will be accepted? > And just keeping with the latest version to provide a patch is way over > my resources. I don't have the time. And I don't have the line to get > from Ximian every latest version. This is why I stick with the MDK8.2 > defaults in the first place. > > > You can goto the mail config and disable the accounts easily. It was > > done that way specifically for this reason (well, among others, but it > > was a high priority reason). > > Okay. If I disable them, how do I collect the mail? By enabling > them? If this is the answer don't bother, it would be the lamest > answer, just to prove some code might work. Again, names: Eudora has a > list with the accounts. If there is a POP/IMAP server/account mentioned > than this is in the list. You have a flag to set in order that the > "check mail" function takes into consideration that particual account. > And for the rest - right click and chose "get mail". As easy as that. > Can Evolution do that? _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
