Hello, I realize now that this email is rather long, so I've divided it into sections, with the overview following. Feel free to skip to whatever catches your interest, as I respect and value your time. Balsa has improved leaps and bounds since the 1.x days when I started using it. I love balsa, and have yet to find a nicer mailer, but here's a couple of things that are best described with the term 'bug'. I haven't posted in a while, so there's much to catch up on <grins>. OVERVIEW * Message composition window size * DnD with escaped chars in filenames * Redoing attachment listing * Random crashes * failed to read a valid object(!?) * Address completion * two bugs in undo * keybind bug in error message * find-in-messageThe screenshot referred to below, which illustrates 4 of the issues discussed, can be found at
http://kacper.doesntexist.org/balsa-cramped.jpg [80KB] as it was too large to pass the 40KB post restriction on this list. *** Message composition window size *** I'm writing this on my laptop - haven't tried balsa on my laptop before - and the biggest problem is that I have a 800x600 screen, and while the main window scales to a comfortable size, the message window for some reason won't scale below 750x550(eyeballed it) or so, though there is no apparent reason for this, as there is plenty of wasted space. Take a look at the screenie attached and judge for yourself, I feel pretty cramped. *** DnD with escaped chars in filenames *** Balsa will currently incorrectly parse the DnD target filename if the path contains spaces - in the attached screenie you'll also be able to see the error message that appears. In the console, I get "Trying to attach '/home/comotion/balsa%20cramped.jpg'" I thought this might be a case of my (rox) filer escaping things balsa didn't expect to see escaped, but it seems that nautilus also does this, while DnD'ing a file from konqueror does... nothing? *** Redoing attachment listing *** And while we're on the subject of attachments, there was talk some while ago about re-doing the attachment listing in the message window, which I think would be a wonderful idea. Indeed, the current message part listing is absolutely wonderful, and I wish message composition had something similar. My case against the current display is (and I hope I am not offending anybody by complaining about it): ** case against - icons waste a hole load of space, horizontally as well as vertically (not convinced? check out the screenie!) - icons correspond to default nautilus icons, which are rather ugly, and non-gnome users won't know how to change them (if, indeed, that option exists at all) - icons don't correspond to mime-type (at least not if you don't use the gnome suite), they all look the same - due to the large icon display, long filenames and the mime type sometimes fall out of the bottom of the "attachments" window. - the full path of the attachment isn't visible IMO, the only thing the attachment display has going for it is that it displays the mime type of the attached files. ** alternate design I propose an attachment view (in the same place), that merely lists in_text the full path of the file along with a column for its mime type. Optionally, and this would actually be neat, there could be a small icon either to the front or at the very end of each entry, however this icon should be no taller than the default font. *** random crashes *** I've recently fallen back to using the 2.2.6 due to its relative stability, however I'm experiencing random crashes every so often, and today I decided to look at one of these coredumps. What I see is that bndx_changed_find_row was the last call in balsa actual, which called g_signal_emit, which again did a whole load of library calls which finally invoked the signal handler (for sig11, I presume). I hope what I just said was correct, but other than that I can only guess at what's going on. I took a look at the cvs changelog for that file, and there are no (logged) changes concerning bndx_{anything} since May, so I'm assuming these random crashes didn't just disappear in cvs since the 2.2.6 release(this may not be a valid assumption - I'll get back into cvs as soon as I've had some time to compile it). So I took a look at the cvs source, and g_signal_emit is called at the end of this function, with the index pointer and the INDEX_CHANGED signal. The library calls that follow look pretty innocent, but then again I have no clue in the slightest about gtk. Does someone with a little more knowledge care to take a look? *** failed to read a valid object(!?) *** Also, I saw this recently message in the console recently: Failed to read a valid object file image from memory. Rather alarming, considering that balsa *didn't* crash after this showed up. *** Address completion *** One more tiny thingy: why can't email addresses <tab>-complete like everything else unixy, instead of M$ Windows <arrowdown>-completion? Every time I use this feature I instinctively lunge for the <tab>- button, and get disappointed like a minx. An option for this, or the default behavior of having both work would be wonderful. I realize now that it does conflict with the <tab>-for-next-input- field, but can't we work something out? On the occasion that I do actually remember that I should do a <arrowdown>, I select the address I want, I then proceed to push tab to go to get the next input field, only to find I've been kicked in the shins: balsa ignores my selection unless I explicitly confirm it with <enter> For example, <tab> could select the first auto-complete match as well as going to the next input field. *** two bugs in undo *** - you can't save the message then undo. Indeed, the undo button won't come on again until you actually delete some text. This is certainly not the way I expect undo to work, not even when I'm using vi!:w - pushing undo will ungratefully reset the message view to the top and (I just realized this) the actual cursor to the bottom of the message, forcing you to manually find your place again, and kicks you in the shin by confusing you even further if you attempt to do so using the keyboard. *** keybind bug in error message *** the error message shown on the screenie has C bound for both Clear and Close. *** find-in-message *** Peter (or was it Pawel? I can't find the messages in my archive atm) had this almost working... what happened? Real handy for messages that are larger than can be quickly scanned by the eye (such as this one ;-) *** failed to sync inbox *** I get a "Failed to sync inbox" occasionally in a dialog(which to me means it's a fatal message!) while in the process of downloading large amounts of mail... though I do seem to have received all all my mail. asdasd If you've read all I had to say, I thank you for your time. Questions, comments and complaints will be _greatly_ appreciated, but post to the list, and don't even think about cc:ing me! 0K -- I do not need HTML email, virus warnings or unsolicited forwards. Get my GnuPG public key from pgp.mit.edu. Send flames to /dev/null Signed mail preferred. Please encrypt where appropriate.
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