Re: Mail & PGP

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

larry@alaska.net (Adam Shand) wrote:
> * 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.

Hmm. I've never had any problems with it, but YMMV. (Not SMTP, by the
way, but RFC 822.)

>> 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.

See, that drives me up the wall. I don't like the fact that it all goes
through another editor (and one so badly written that it needs to insert
a spurious blank line at the end of every message, at that, though
that's a minor point :)), I don't see why I can't just use the one I
like. I want to use my preferred editor for *all* my messages, and I
don't want to have to contort my hands into Alt-_ first in order to do
so.

I used to get terminally confused when using pine+pico for mail and
trn+vim for news. When "ESC {gq}" (or "ESC gqip", more or less
equivalently, to rejustify a paragraph) and things like that have become
automatic reflexes you tend to type rather spurious stuff into pico.
Maybe I wire editor functions into my head more than most people do,
though.

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]