Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!ginosko!aplcen!osiris!johnj
From: johnj@osiris.UUCP (John Johnston johnj@welch.jhu.edu)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Things I'd like to see in ELM
Keywords: verbose sendmail flag, time-out simple visual editor
Message-ID: <2918@osiris.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jul 89 22:02:22 GMT
Organization: Johns Hopkins Hospital
Lines: 39


	We've been considering setting ELM up as our 'default' mailer
for non-sophisticated users. Part of the requests that I've been getting
back from the people who are doing evaluation are:

	- ability to pass the verbose flag off to sendmail
		from within the elmrc file rather than command
		line. IMHO, command lines and .rc files should
		always support complete operation on eachother - 
		they should totally overlap.
		(this is easy and took me a second to add)

	- some means whereby the mailer could be told to 'time-out'
		if left inactive for too long. It would be nice
		if there was a way to tell the mailer to save 
		itself and quit after a certain amount of idle
		time. This is probably not generally useful to
		the world at large - when I add it, will anyone
		be interested ?

	- some kind of simple visual editor. My user community is
		used to using the arrow keys on the keyboard to
		move around, and other PC-type editing stuff. If
		someone has a simple in-memory screen editor with
		key-mapping, that would be nice to plug in. Calling
		an external program (we are using microemacs with a
		minimal configuration) is slow, and a more powerful
		builtin editor would be great.

	- some ability to redefine command keys. I've considered
		attacking this one myself. I don't think it would 
		be too hard to hack the functions that read command
		characters to allow some redefinition of keys. Non
		"vi" users and people who are used to PCs fail to
		grasp the complex reasons why the 'up' key is 'k'
		instead of up-arrow, etc.

	Comments ?
	--mjr();