First post, and I recognize it's going to make me somewhat unpopular in the eyes of some, but I would very much like to respond.
The way TheBat's editor handles linebreaks is seriously broken in my opinion. It was the one single issue that kept me from purchasing TheBat for years. I finally relented, since I need multiple accounts and TheBat *is* still the best email client available for Windows... but the editor bugs me every day. > So how can absolute formatting in a plain ASCII text document be > distinguished from having soft formatting that changes to hard > formatting when the "send" button is pressed? In precisely the way other clients do. I'm not talking about brain-dead software like Outlook Express; I'm talking about *excellent* software such as Forte Agent. There is actually very little to distinguish! In all your comments, above and below, you're implying that TheBat's behavior is somehow standard, whereas all other applications behave in ways that deviate from the standard. But please recognize that it's TheBat that behaves in a non-standard way. Specifically, it inserts a newline character where the user didn't. So again, there is nothing to disttinguish. The program should simply respect what the user entered. If I want a paragraph break, I'll press Enter. If I don't, I don't. The client can and should break lines at a predefined length when sending, and all modern email clients do so, although it isn't really necessary most of the time. (Note: I know about interoperability; in early 90s I had an account on a VAX machine - the 'mail' program would simply crash if I didn't hit Enter within a span of 256 characters. Which is why the option to hard-wrap should be there.) > If what is sent is to > be exactly the same in appearance as what was typed, then what's the > difference? Does it have to be the same in appearance? Isn't it much more convenient if you can resize the window as you're typing, and have the text automatically conform to the new size of the window - and so can the recipient? Isn't it more convenient when, if you add or remove some text inside a paragraph, the paragraph stays, rather than being split into a bunch of uneven lines? > I feel a lot more confident in knowing that what I send is formatted > exactly as I intended. I'd rather have the confidence of knowing that what I type is displayed exactly as I intended. The essence of my gripe is that TheBat insists on inserting linebreaks where I didn't enter them. Initially, I thought it was a hitch of an early version that would eventually be ironed out - but now that it seems to be a well-entrenched feature, it's still wrong. > I am grateful that TB makes no changes > whatsoever to what I wrote when I hit "Send". I am grateful that Forte Agent lets me type and reformat easily, and still sends RFC-conformant messages. In other words, it provides the best of both worlds. (the above is what TheBat did after I inserted "it provides" into a previously-typed paragraph. I would now have to go back and reformat it to make it look good. Very awkward. ) DC>> It makes some kinds of editing changes vastly easier. > I object to the use of the word "vastly" here - it highlights a > complete misunderstanding of the way TB's very excellent editor > actually works, something it would be hard pressed to do if it did > not have the model as the view. Sure, if it had been written > differently from the start, it might be able to provide the > differentiation being asked for. Simply put, TheBat's editor doesn't have the concept of a paragraph. It only has a concept of a line. It doesn't know or care where a paragraph begins and ends. It is excellent in other ways, but on the point under discussion TheBat is making a throwback to very old times, and it's not at all convenient. I often type lists into messages, such as a) foo b) bar c) baz and if I happen to not put a blank line before or after the list, and then hit Alt+L to reformat, because I entered or deleted some text in the middle, I get this: --- cut and it's not at all convenient. I often type lists into messages, such as a) foo b) bar c) baz --- cut It may be a lot of things, but it is not convenient. And all of the popular text-only editors for Windows (Textpad, NoteTab, Ultraedit) managen to avoid this problem. All of them, also, have the *option* to save a file with or without linebreaks (or using 'soft' / 'hard' breaks, depending on the preferred terminology). So these apps give you the behavior you prefer, and they give me the behavior I do. TheBat is weaker here, simply because it does not have the flexibility. The inability to distinguish between lines and paragraphs is not TheBat's virtue, it's a shortcoming, and one widely avoided. Even the standard Windows "memo" control is smarter than that - because it doesn't really require all that much smarts. "Don't insert a linebreak unless user hit Enter." > It does have very simple keystrokes to compensate for the lack of > "soft" internal format construction. If used sensibly, it can do > things just as easily (using Ctrl-F as a toggle or Alt-L to reformat > marked sections on-the-fly) and sometimes even more easily > (free-caret / column tabs / wrapped paragraph indentation and more) > than the supposedly "more capable" competition. Oh, I think you're just being snide here, sorry. Of course those other apps are more capable, because they can do what TheBat does, and they can also act otherwise; they give you an option. TheBat, with its manual 'format block' command, is more like the line-based editors of old. The reason I believe soft-wrapping is good is that it makes the computer perform a task that otherwise the user must manually perform. Going back and pressing Alt+L is not what I enjoy doing. .marek jedlinski -- No ads, no nags freeware: http://keynote.prv.pl (KeyNote, PhoneDeck, KookieJar, Oubliette) "Evolution is a harsh mistress." ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
