Re: [Evolution] top versus bottom posting and the "control-L" function

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 15:02 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> ... They responded that that wasn't
> really the idea, since the poster is meant to edit the quote (removing
> irrelevant material and inserting comments) and that's easier to do from
> the top down. Nevertheless they did agree to include a Preference option
> to place the cursor at the bottom. See "Preferences->Composer
> Preferences->Start typing at the bottom when replying".
>
> The odd thing is that the option is grayed out in 2.26.3. The even odder
> thing is that I've only just noticed this! Sometimes what looks like a
> great idea turns out not to be that useful in practice. 

I don't see the advantage to leaving the cursor at the top for editing
purposes in Evolution.  If Evo implemented real keyboard-based text
editor operations like Emacs or vi, then maybe, but Evo's composer is a
graphical editor, so who cares where the cursor is when you want to make
major edits to the text?  You're going to use your mouse to select and
cut etc. anyway so cursor position at the start is irrelevant.

Personally my favorite Evo-only feature (at least I've not seen other
mail clients who use it) is how if you select a part of the message then
reply, then only that part is quoted in your reply.  If you get used to
this feature, then the likelihood that you'll want to do FURTHER editing
is greatly reduced... so I always set "start typing at the bottom" as
that's what I almost always want to do.