The Great "Hard Return" Debate

[Darin McBride]

On Tue, 9 Nov 1999 16:26:57 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:

>Tuesday, November 09, 1999, 4:16:26 PM, Darin wrote:
>> Thanks, Steve.  I was going to post a nice, flaming reply, but I
>> figured, what the heck ... if you want to call me names, go ahead -
>> it's you're email list.
        ^^^^^^ silly me.  It's "your", obviously.
>
>    Where did I call you names?

Up at the top - but you didn't quote it.  It was something about
"ignorant".

>> I disagree with your terminology.  Greatly disagree.  But *I* am the
>> ignorant one.  Okay.
>
>    I did not.  It is clear that you never tried the external editor support
>otherwise you would have found that your assertions were false.
>
>    Now, what else would you call that but ignorant?

Except that I *have* tried to use the external editor support ... and
none of my assertions have been proven false through it.  Unless
everything I said was added since 1.9 - the last time I even bothered
trying to use the external editor.  Okay, now that I've set up the
external editor to try, again, I reiterate: the external editor does
not provide seamless support for all of these things.

What it gives me is two separate, mutually exclusive dialogs.  One for
setting the PMMail-specific things (including attachments), one for
editing text.  Unfortunately, when I'm doing mail, all of this is *ONE
TASK* and should *NEVER* be split amongst multiple dialogs.  It would
be bad enough should everything be split amongst multiple *panels*, but
this is absolutely awful.  If the external editor was the only way of
editing email, you can be sure I would never have started using PMMail.

I am currently writing an *email*, not *editing text*.  Sure, from a
technical standpoint, I'm in a "Multi-Line Edit" window, and, sure,
this part of the email is text.  But that's not what I'm doing: I'm
interacting with an object ("Email"), manipulating its data (the To,
Subject, and Body portions), and about to tell it to send itself.

I'm not interested in your procedural malarky.  If I were, I'd be using
Windows.  I'm not.  I'm using an Object-Oriented Graphical User
Interface, and expect it to act that way.

[When I use elm on Linux, I expect a very different interface because
Linux is not object-oriented, but procedurally-oriented.  However,
there's a reason I do 99.9999% of my email on OS/2!]