On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:28:27AM -0400, pinkee@cavegirl.org wrote:
Not to beat a dead horse... but see the not sane line breaks above? Why
you not like mutt? Mutt rocks. And it is very customizable, so you make
it what you want. I don't know anything about pegasus, do you use a text
editor to compose mail?
Because he likes a GUI interface, which is Mike's perogative. It's
not exactly his obligation to make his GUI-interfaced MUA wrap lines
in a way that makes those of us who don't like GUI interfaces happy,
but it is the neighborly thing to do, and Mike is trying.
I feel about MUAs just as I do about OSes, shells, and web browsers.
We have open standards precisely so that I can use what I like, you
can use what you like, and Mike can use what he likes, and none of
us need to convert the other.
So happens that some of the standards are broken and some of the
various objects don't comply to the standards, but those're
orthogonal points, and the latter case provides a real reason
to say "a is better than b" (as opposed to just saying that when
what you really mean is "I prefer a to be"). <80 column lines are
a de facto--but only in the Unix world--standard, not a de jure
one. So it's not shocking that an MUA on OSes with no concept of
a "standard terminal width" doesn't pay attention to it. (Arguably,
wrapping text at whatever the window size happens to be is the
first step down the hideous, slippery slope of non-text emails,
something the very real standards never considered and aren't
well-suited for, but that's also an orthogonal issue.)
Note that you and I'd be just as irritated if Mike were composing
his emails on a perfectly standards-compliant 132-column terminal.
The real solution for me to be happy is to hack mutt to add a "wrap
when quoting" setting. (No, it doesn't seem to have one. Yes, I just
checked.) Until I get a chance to do that, I just periodically toss
friendly, []ed requests at people whose messages I have to rewrap
manually. Most, like Mike, try to be neighborly, but can't be
expected either to remember all the time or, necessarily, to honor my
request at all. (So when people like Mike say, "but that's a huge
hassle for me," I just shrug and keep doing what I'm doing.)
--
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net