Re: Mail & PGP

[Adam Shand <larry@alaska.net>]

> ("Personally" noted, but for the benefit of other readers:)

i knew i was gonna catch it for that :-)

> I actually find that, for a committed vim user like me, and indeed

first thing, i use vim for admin work (:%s/whatever/something/g rocks
...), but for for typing email i finding annoying.  when i use pico with
mutt i get stuck with these two things:

 * ^J doesn't work, this is a feature i use *all* the time and i just can't
   stand not having it.  i am aware that there is an equivelant feature in
   vim.

 * because you can't (nicely) edit the headers while you are editing the
   message you are forced to do it at the "pre-send" screen.  this is okay
   (though a little strange for a user used to pine/modern gui
   mailers) however if you have a long To: or Cc: list it goes off the side
   of the screen and you can't see all the recipients of the message without
   editing that field and then scrolling through it.  when you set 'set
   edit_headers' on you can edit them in the message, but i found that
   really weird things happened with long recipent lists (like mutt would
   insert a carriage return in the middle of the Cc: header, and since
   that's how smtp delimits the headers of a message it means that you end
   up with all the headers below that point in the message body.  ugly.

> probably for anyone who doesn't like pico, mutt's editor integration is
> actually much *better* than pine's. Any time I tried to get pine to use
> vi as its editor I found that I either lost features or had to run
> everything through pico anyway, simply because the fact that pine's
> designed with its own editor means that it's not designed for hooking
> cleanly into other editors. Maybe I wasn't setting it up correctly, I
> don't know, but it never seemed worth the hassle to me.

i use vim in pine all the time and it works just great.  "alt + _" and
you're in vim, do whatever reformatting you need and carry on.

> None of this really applies if you like pico, of course, but I thought
> I'd throw in my take on the perennial mailer debate. :)

i do like pico (and actually i'm talking to the author of nano hoping that i
can convince him to make nano suceed in the places where pico fails), i also
like vim but for different tasks.  if i want to type i want pico, if i want
to program or massage data, i want vim.  i would love to change to mutt
(pine is slow and pigish when you have large folders, it's not threaded, not
very configurable and it's pgp/gpg support sucks in comparison).

adam.