[Users] Editing behaviour when replying

[Steve Litt]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2013 09:27:11 -0300
Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI <renaud at olgiati-in-paraguay.org> wrote:

> In Kmail when editing a reply to a message, if one broke a line in a
> quoted paragraph with a CR, the second part of the line would
> automagically have a ">" prepended, showing that this was stil a
> quote of the replied-to message.
> 
> Is there a way to have the same behaviour in Claws ?
>  
> Cheers,
>  
> Ron.

Be careful what you wish for, Ron. I haven't looked at the code (Claws
code is pretty hard to read), but I'd guess your suggestion would
impact the word-wrap algorithm, which I've heard more than one
knowledgeable people on this list refer to as fragile.

From the user viewpoint (or at least user Steve Litt), the current
Claws word-wrapping algorithm is the best email client word-wrapping
algorithm ever made. It wraps while I'm adding characters to the end,
and if deletions make a short line, you can Del the following line into
the short line, backspace and space, and the whole thing reformats. The
point is, if you *want* long lines for some reason, Claws will let them
exist, and that's how they're received on the other end.

Also, Claws is smart enough to know if you start a line with an
asterisk and space, that's a bulleted list, and it wordwraps everything
else in that paragraph indenting two spaces, so it's easy to see the
separation of the bullet points. Just try that in Kmail.

I moved from Kmail to Claws about 3 years ago, when Kmail transitioned
to Kmail2 with Akonadi and Nepomuk (see
http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm). I chose Claws
because I found Thunderbird incredibly slow, Mutt was inconvenient, and
most of the rest of the email clients didn't work at all. I found that
Claws is underdocumented, and can be very annoying until you get used
to its landmines and quirks, but once your fingers learn the riffs to
work with Claws, it's very productive.

In your case, when I hit Enter in the middle of quoted text, my fingers
automatically put right angle bracket and space before the newly
created line, and then I go and put stuff in between them.

Bottom line: All email clients suck. I've found that Claws sucks the
least :-)

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance