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 j smith x com 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?
