Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!uwvax!gjetost.cs.wisc.edu!solomon
From: solomon@gjetost.cs.wisc.edu (Marvin Solomon)
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: <8046@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 31 Jul 89 12:33:30 GMT
References: <2918@osiris.UUCP> <1989Jul31.012922.12548@DSI.COM>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: solomon@gjetost.cs.wisc.edu (Marvin Solomon)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 36

In article <1989Jul31.012922.12548@DSI.COM> syd@DSI.COM writes:
>johnj@osiris.UUCP (John Johnston johnj@welch.jhu.edu) writes:
>
>:	- 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.

I think I know what he means:  I too like to leave Elm running all day, but
sometimes I forget to exit before going home, and then when I try to
read my mail from home, I get the "sorry, Elm is already running" message.
I can kill the process, but that effectively does a 'x', which means that
all the sorting and winnowing I've done all day is lost (and I get about
100 messages each day).  I've hacked in some changes that catch SIGTERM
and effectively do a 'Q' command (actually, a sequence of 'Q' commands,
since 'Q' doesn't always get you out the first time).  It should be
easy to cobble up a elmquit command using ps, grep, and kill.
I'll post the mods to this group after I'm reasonably confident they work.
>
>Lastly, if you are making changes to Elm, why not join the Elm
>development group and let others share in your changes.
What does that entail?
Can't one simple contribute stuff without joining a development group?
--
	Marvin Solomon
	Computer Sciences Department
	University of Wisconsin, Madison WI
	solomon@cs.wisc.edu, uwvax!solomon