The text editor needs help. Its major problem is its use of hard carriage returns (CRLF) during composition. Those should be avoided until necessary, at send time.
Many text editors have a clean "model/view" design, instead of Bat's confused "view is the model" design. With real text editors, there are no hard CRLF's in the text -- unless and until you put them there. The view is a word-wrapped display of the unwrapped model data. The word wrapping is just a convenient view on the model. I find myself constantly going back and forth between Bat and text editors. The Bat has no distinction between model and view. So word wraps on screen MUST BE hard line breaks in the model data. This confusion makes editing tricky and tedious in Bat. Bat tries to compensate. It offers commands that create, on the fly, "temporary independent model data" which Bat then reformats for the current view. These commands are the beginnings of a good model/view distinction. One such command is "Utilities > Format Block > Left." This command is somewhat helpful. However it's still much easier to work with real, independent model data that has NO hard CRLF's. When I edit in Bat, I am constantly tweaking line breaks and using this command, "Utilities > Format Block > Left." I would rather not have to fiddle so much. A proper distinction between model and view would give me that freedom. This is how I work in my text editor. Line breaks are just not a big issue. For one example of how this works, try UltraEdit, http://www.UltraEdit.com Look at the Format menu, "Convert CR/LF's to wrap" and its inverse, "Convert wrap to CR/LF." These specific commands translate between model and view only when I want it. UltraEdit doesn't force me to use model data that is identical to the current view. Many other text editors have similar features. UltraEdit is just one example. The main point is, they distinguish between model and view. P.S. There are many "e-mail aware" text editor widgets on the market that Bat might use without a great deal of work. Writing a good text editor is non-trivial. Any issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal lists several dozen in the back. They can be put into commercial programs like Bat royalty-free. Regards. Mark ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
