[BUGS] Toy GUIs (was: format=flawed (was: Why is my mail being horribly newlined?))

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 14 December 2007 at 20:07:10 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 05:49:44PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 December 2007 at  9:38:45 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
>>> On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 07:11:12AM +1100, Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
>>>> Is there any way to disable using flowed format?
>>>
>>> I don't think so.  The right answer isn't to try to avoid flowed
>>> format, but to embrace it, and live with the 75-column wrap that
>>> Mail.app will give your messages automatically.
>>
>> Never!  I want my messages to be displayed the way I formatted them,
>> not the way some MUA things they should look.
>
> Well, you're clearly not Mail.app's target demographic, then.

Agreed.  I'm surprised there is one.

> You probably hate that Web pages render according to the
> viewer's preferences, too.  It comes down to the same thing:
> 80-column text windows are inappropriate models for a typeset,
> arbitrary-sized display window,

Strongly disagreed.  Why should the text be reformatted to fit the
size of and arbitrary-sized display window?  The arbitrary size is
either something in the mind of the window manager programmer (and
thus usually too small), or it's full screen (almost invariably too
large, but usually mitigated by the arbitrary subdivision of the
screen into panes).

> which is what the market (for text production and viewing systems)
> has clearly selected, nearly universally.

This is true, for some definition of "select"--they've had it foisted
on them, and so far they haven't resisted.  But it won't last.  It's
an indication of the immaturity of the industry.  It ignores such
basics as the human eye.  There's a reason why books are typeset the
way they are: the eye can read approximately 70-80 characters well,
and anything wider than that requires too much eye movement.

>>> If you edit all of your text to be a long list of one-line
>>> paragraphs, all shorter than 75 characters, then it'll probably
>>> stay that way through the list manager, but why would you want
>>> that sort of grief?
>>
>> So that it will look the way you want it to look.  And with a good
>> editor it's no work.
>
> Why should you care how long the lines of your praragraphs are?

Why should you care whether your clothes are in good condition,
whether you wash or clean your teeth, or

The real thing is that it's *difficult* to read over-long lines.  And
many MUAs break more complicated layout almost beyond belief.

> It matters for some things, like program coding, but for
> english text it hardly matters at all.

Not if you don't want to read it.

Have you noticed how frustrating a typical mail exchange with people
using Microsoft or Apple MUAs is?  I'm noticing more and more that
people don't seem to read their mail.  I'm sure it's not because mine
is correctly formatted; obscenities like Microsoft "Outlook" take out
the formatting anyway, and do it their way.  More and more I'm
receiving replies which don't address the issues I've raised?  See
http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-dec2007.html#6 for a recent example.
It happens so often that I can't recall when I got a proper reply from
anybody in the Microsoft space.  I'm sure it's related to the
difficulty of use of the "tools".

> Sure, it's not much work to have nicely-formatted plain-text
> paragraphs in vi or emacs, but Mail.app doesn't give you access to
> either of those.  (and neither does Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution,
> or whatever everyone uses these days.)

Which shows what absolute poverty these toys have reached.  If there's
one central thing you want to be able to do with a computer, it's
manipulate text.  Anything that deliberately makes that more difficult
is just plain broken.

>> If you have to use things like Apple Mail, you can probably work
>> around this "feature" by setting the line length to some very long
>> length.  That way it won't try to wrap.
>
> Nope.  As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to tell Mail.app
> how long plain-text lines should be split (not that I've looked a
> whole lot.)  And if you *could* do that, it'd be impossible to use,
> because every time you edited a paragraph you'd have to go back and
> manually join and re-break every line.

It seems that the original poster does manually break every line.  But
of course, this is just one more example of its extreme breakage.

> Despite several deficiencies, I reckon that Mail.app is best GUI
> e-mail program available, for most non-list uses.

If it's the best, how bad are the rest?

> Claws-mail is getting close, but it's HTTP/RTF content-type handling
> is still a bit clunky (and read-only), and it seems to require a bit
> more manual intervention to keep IMAP folder hierarchies
> synchronized.
>
> I've yet to find a GUI mailer that can hold a candle to Mutt for
> wading through mailing lists (why do none have "delete-thread"
> mapped to a useful key sequence?) but there's no way that Mutt is up
> to the task of modern corproate e-mail (i.e., formatted, in-line
> images, stylized signature blocks, meeting requests, other blaugh.)

mutt is definitely showing its age, and it could be improved to do
some of these things.  I wish people would direct their attention to
making good software instead of brightly coloured toys.

Greg
--
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