Subject: Re: [pine] Re: being friendly with alternate editors

From: "Arthur H. Johnson II" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 15:54:24 -0400 (EDT)

Basically.  It doesnt bother me at all.

-- 

Arthur H. Johnson II
Senior Systems Engineer

The Linux Box
206 S. Fifth Ave. Suite 150
Ann Arbor, MI  48104

tel.  734-761-4689
fax.  734-769-8938
pgr.  734-882-0323

On Wed, 8 May 2002, Michael Talbot-Wilson wrote:

> Ye 2002-05-07 14:52 -0400, Arthur H. Johnson II skribis:
>
> > Don't forget about Emacs.  I personally think the editor is stupid, but
> > its a religious thing.
>
> I don't think Pico is stupid, but I also use Emacs as my Pine
> editor.  I don't want to use a variety of different editors for
> different things.  I think the original complaint is rather trivial.
> It might be a slight inconvenience to not have the headers present
> while he's typing the body, but he'll get over it.
>

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From: Tony Tung <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 10:55:04 -0700 (PDT)

> > while he's typing the body, but he'll get over it.

While I agree that the absence of the headers is not very significant,
there is a significant drawback to using an alternate editor that
integration could solve -- namely that one does not get new mail
notification while in the alternate editor.  Often I will be writing an
email when I receive some incoming email which has higher priority.

An alternative solution is an asynchronous composition facility.  By this,
I mean that it will fork a process that calls the editor.  While the
editor is running, the main process continues.  Once the editor finishes,
the child process signals the main process and returns to the default pine
composition window.  Of course, this is contingent on the appropriate
facilities being present -- such as X or screen active -- such that the
editor and pine can coexist.

Tony

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From: Joel Boonstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 23:56:31 -0400 (EDT)

Someone said...

> > > I think the original complaint is rather trivial.  It might be a
> > > slight inconvenience to not have the headers present while he's
> > > typing the body, but he'll get over it.

Then Tony said...

> notification while in the alternate editor.  Often I will be writing
> an email when I receive some incoming email which has higher priority.

Yes, I agree.  That's another problem I came across today.

To defend my header request...

Many times I am replying to an email, but don't know to whom I'm
replying.  Since I answer a lot of email from a lot of different
sources, I consistenly write to different people.  It happens all the
time that I'll start my reply, then have no idea how to address the
person I'm writing to, have to save and quit my composition, glance at
the header, and then continue my composition.

Yes, that's a minor annoyance, perhaps trivial.  It's not going to stop
me from using vim (especially with mail.vim syntax highlighting!), but
it sure would be nice.  I'd imagine there are others in a similar
situation.

Joel

-- 
[ joel boonstra | [email-masked] ]

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From: Mats Dufberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 09:15:10 +0200 (CEST)

> it sure would be nice.  I'd imagine there are others in a similar

I agree with you. I would have used emacs if the headers follow the mail
to the editor. I often update the headers while writing the mail.

Mats

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mats Dufberg                                 [email-masked]
Blåarvsgränd 42                                    +46-8-38 48 59
SE-162 45 Vällingby, Sweden                       +46-70-258 2588

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From: Marc Rouleau <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 07:28:40 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)

I haven't heard anyone mention my alt-ed pet peeve.  This is a bug
rather than a desired feature ...

If I have a compose editor open, and I click in the main PC-Pine
window, I get the "PC-Pine is currently waiting for the alternate
editor ..." popup.  I choose OK to continue waiting, complete my
message, and exit vim.

My updates appear in the PC-Pine main window, but another vim starts
up immediately with the contents of my message.  This goes on
perpetually until I click in the main PC-Pine window and choose Cancel
to stop waiting.

Unfortunately, PC-Pine remains confused.  At that point I am unable to
modify the headers.  My only choice is to send, cancel, or postpone,
and PC-Pine continues to exhibit the perpetual alt-ed popup behavior
until I quit entirely and restart.

I get into this situation surprisingly often -- I get interrupted
while composing a message, work in another application or two, and
return directly to PC-Pine without remembering that I was in the
middle of composition.

    -- Marc Rouleau

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From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 13:55:40 +0100 (BST)

> editor ..." popup.  I choose OK to continue waiting, complete my

The way I get around the problem you described is

 DON'T TOUCH THAT DIALOG BOX

when I see it and instead use the MS Windows taskbar (or ALT+TAB)
to shift the focus to my alt editor and continue working there.
Usually everything works fine then, no infinite loops! But, I
agree with you that it would be nice if this part of Pine's UI
were fixed, e.g., just a dialog box that says "Go away and deal
with your alt editor; I'm in a state of suspended animation."

Nancy
^x

-- 
ii.com Main Pine Page: <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/>

Nancy McGough           <http://www.ii.com/>           Infinite Ink
--= Sent via Pine 4.44: IMAP, NNTP & ESMTP for Unix/Win/MacOS X =--

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From: James <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 08:17:39 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Nancy McGough wrote:

> ...it would be nice if this part of Pine's UI

Add another one who gets hit with this bug every now and then.  Though
how it usually gets me is that I'm replying to something, and flip over
to the message window to check on what the message actually said - and
I need to scroll down to see the text I want to look at.  Oops!

I would think at least the minimum correct behavior would be for the
PC-Pine window to do nothing until you finish editing...

James