[arachne] Re: Riddles... and moving on to a lot of other stuff

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

> From: "Bastiaan Edelman, PA3FFZ" <bastiaan.pa3ffz@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 16:20:03 +00
> Subject: [arachne] Re: Riddles  --- was Re:arachne Digest V2 #100

> I never have these problems by using the internal Arachne editor.

Nor do I lose the changes to the To, CC, Subject, Attachnments
and other fields, or anyone else. The problems I have are

1. the internal editor is not full screen

2. I can't alter the right margin to where I want it

3. wordwrap gets ignored if I try to edit or add something in
   the middle of a line

4. I can't reformat a paragraph automatically if the line
   overflows due to 3 above

5. I can't link it to a spell checker, I can't run it as
   multiscreen, I can't use any of the macros in my favourite
   text editor, and so on...

6. every now and then it pauses to refresh the screen and does it
   oh so slooooooowly on my 486. Since Arachne is intended to
   operate on the lowest level of IBM-compatible computer, I
   dread to think what that must be like on base-level PC.

7 and THE WORST ONE OF ALL... sometimes it hashes up my
   document in ways that are very hard to recover from. This
   seems to be more likely to happen if I have been doing a lot
   of cut-editing, as one SHOULD do to quotes before posting a
   reply.

> The internal editor suits me very well for composing and/or answering
> e-mails.

Well, there you go then. Personnally, I find it rather horrible.

>> And unfortunately with the way Arachne works, the changes you've
>> made to the fields at the top of the Compose Message page have
>> been LOST!

>> This might be another thing to look at when the gurus get around
>> to fixing the internal editor.

> Perhaps things get lost when changing from internal to external editor
> and back.

No "perhaps" about it. Any changes are always lost when the
External Editor is called. We know about this.

> But, I cann't find anything wrong with the internal editors
> use for e-mail.

Nothing at all? Then what do you call the following...?

> The one thing that anoys me is the wordwrap if there is a 'space' at the
> end of the line... and that wordwrap is off when using the internal
> editor outside of 'insight'.

If you try to insert anything to the left of the end of the line,
whether the characters there are blanks or not, the wordwrap is
temporarily off. Apparently this was done intentionally so you
can make very long lines, such as for URLs and so on.

And unfortunately, the editor doesn't provide any means of
automatically reformatting the paragraph to correct this.

>>> I treat V2 #93 e-mails like SPAM... just delete them.
>> Then I guess you've been missing a lot of the messages.
> I'am sure I do. Today 25 messages concerning Arachne were in the inbox.
> Maybe you have got the time to open and read them all... and add some
> time to answer or react to the interesting ones.

I either find the time or I stop corresponding with people.

What is the point of corresponding on a mailing list if you don't
have time to read the mail? It's like buying a newspaper and not
reading it.

> It would be nice to be able to judge from the "Subject" line if the mail
> is interesting or not... that is what the subject line is meant for.

Yup, sure would.

I guess most of us have been lax in not rewriting the subject
line when we reply to mail. We should look to improving that.

> A related problem: it would be a nice feature if the subject line could
> be changed before an e-mail is stored in a folder.

Alterantively you could create extra folders for mini-subjects.

> Of course the mail folders are subject related but it is not possible to
> add remarks or priority to the stored mails in the mail folders.

True.

Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

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