Subject: ESC key in PC-pine

From: Erik Lawaetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1993 05:54:44 PDT

I haven't been following the discussion on PC-pine thoroughly enough to 
know if this has been suggested already, but after about 10 minutes of 
usage I already miss something badly. The ability for the ESC key to take 
me back, e.g. from the addrbook to the main menu. All I get know is an 
annoyin beep.

--Erik

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 15:04:16 -0700 (PDT)

We made a conscious decision to not give Pine a concept of where "back"
is.  One of the principles of Pine is that hitting a particular key will
do the same thing every time, regardless of the past sequence of commands. 
Using the ESC key is also a problem because of the need to distinguish the
ESC key from an escape sequence.  Programs like 'vi' try to get around
this by using a timer, but that is very unreliable over slow or heavily
used connections.  This leads to surprise, which violates another of our 
major principles.

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA