[Users] Claws config needs much better documentation

[Michael Gmelin]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:44:19 -0400
Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm finding it insanely difficult to configure things in Claws.
> 
> My daily driver desktop's Claws is set up just about exactly how I
> want it, but no matter what I do, I can't get my laptops' Clawses to
> work the same way. My desktop is Claws 3.7.9 on Ubuntu 11.10, and was
> upgraded from whatever they had on Ubuntu 11.04. My laptops are Claws
> 3.8.0 from Ubuntu 12.04.
> 
> My desktop uses d instead of Ctrl+d for delete (or move to trash, not
> sure which), and when you delete one mail, the highlight on the
> message list goes to the next message, and that message loads.
> 
> Not so for the Claws on my laptops. There, when I try to set the
> hotkey to d, by hitting the keystroke while the highlight is on the
> menu item, for either delete or move to trash, instead of changing it
> to d, it just deletes the item after an "are you sure" screen. I
> tried to configure it in the various resource files in
> $HOME/.claws-mail, and the changes got undone by the app.
> 
> Also, on my laptops, when the highlight on the message list falls on
> an email by any other method except mouseclick, the message doesn't
> load. You have to hit Enter to have it load. Worse, the contents of a
> previous message stay on the screen, so if I'm not careful I'll delete
> a good message thinking it's the bad one currently on the screen. I've
> found no way to change this behavior, and no rhyme or reason why one
> of my Clawses behaves the way I want, and the others don't (Note, my
> desktop setup hits its own IMAP server, while the laptops access that
> same desktop server's IMAP).
> 
> This might sound like minor stuff, but when you're dealing with 500 or
> so emails a day, optimal configuration could easily save 1/2 hour per
> day.
> 
> I went all through the user manual, and little if anything was said
> about any of this. Does anyone know of good, complete and accurate
> Claws documentation that tells how to configure things?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
>                           *  http://twitter.com/stevelitt
> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
> 
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Hi Steve,

Have considered copying the ~/.claws-mail directory of your desktop
machine to your laptop? Or at least ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc or doing a
diff of the various rc files to see where they're different. This will
give you the exact same setup. (making a backup of ~/.claws-mail
beforehand won't hurt of course).

The behavior of CTRL-D on your desktop vs. your laptop sounds
like it has been mapped to delete for the whole machine - delete does
in claws-mail what you're describing - if you try using CTRL-D in a
text editor (preferably GTK based like gedit, since this should use the
same toolkit options) you will probably see that your desktop deletes a
character while your laptop doesn't. If this is the case, it's easiest
to fix this for your installation.

Having to hit Enter to read a message is actually not a bug but a
feature (which I personally love), but you can easily customize this to
whatever you prefer under "Preferences -> Display -> Summaries ->
Open message when selected". If you just clone your ~/.claws-mail folder
like I suggested above this will be configured as well.

Cheers,
Michael

(just in case, better safe than sorry: ~ expands to your user's home
directory in the shell. So if your user name is steve, ~ expands most
likely to /home/steve and your claws-mail directory is
at /home/steve/.claws-mail). 

-- 
Michael Gmelin