Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!ctrsol!cica!iuvax!rutgers!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!dsinc!syd From: syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm Subject: Re: Things I'd like to see in ELM Keywords: verbose sendmail flag, time-out simple visual editor Message-ID: <1989Jul31.012922.12548@DSI.COM> Date: 31 Jul 89 01:29:22 GMT References: <2918@osiris.UUCP> Reply-To: syd@DSI.COM Organization: Datacomp Systems, Inc. Huntingdon Valley, PA Lines: 63 johnj@osiris.UUCP (John Johnston johnj@welch.jhu.edu) writes: : 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) We don't put every option in the rc file into the command line because there are too many of them, it would get overly confusing. Remember getopt parses single letters. However, I guess we could try and create a override rc option that takes the name and value, but that would be a pain to type. Its definately a high priority item anyway. : - 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 ? This is actually backwards from how alot of us use Elm. We start it up in a window and let it sit there. Using its internal timout loop to refresh the current mail status. Since it was designed to stay active in a window, I think this is backwards from the design goal. : - 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. Elm is big enough already without some editor also. I recommend using a small outboard editor, that way the start up time will be small. Emacs' startup time is not small, and perhaps a lot of the time is there. : - 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. Not easy to do, remember, we do not use curses at the present, thus we do our own key work, internally. Also, you need to handle timeouts vs function keys, etc. We even punted handling other than HP and ANSI cursor keys (which currently do work) until after curses is in, and currently we are even punting curses due to its problems on many machines. Lastly, if you are making changes to Elm, why not join the Elm development group and let others share in your changes. -- ===================================================================== Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP Elm Coordinator Datacomp Systems, Inc. Voice: (215) 947-9900 syd@DSI.COM or {bpa,vu-vlsi}!dsinc!syd FAX: (215) 938-0235