[comp.mail.mush] a response to other mail...

dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller) (05/15/89)

To: Jeff Woolsey <voder!nsc.nsc.com!nsc.nsc.com!woolsey@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>

> On May 12, 10:15am, Jeff Woolsey said this about:
> "Re: Reporting bugs with mush.."

> Thus, I have some observations about it which I found inconvenient or
> just plain wrong.  I'm running mushtool version 6.4 on a Sun 3/60 with SunOS
> 4.0.1.  The MTA is sendmail, but I don't think that matters here.
> 
> Here's my gripes list:

> 1. Aliases are not pickable or scrollable.  For example I may want to select
>    one and drag it to the compose window.
They are scrollable now -- You should obtain the latest patches for this
feature.  Unfortunately, I wrote mush before the "selection" mechanism was
in sunwindows (pre- sunview).  that's why it's not there.

> 2. Compose doesn't handle werase (^W, usually) correctly.
It should.  It does for me.  ^W (o actually, werase) is taken from your
tty settings.  These tty settings are obtained from the tty which initiates
the mush session.  Under sunOS 4.0, if mushtool is run from your .suntools,
then the tty is "redirected" and mush can't obtain those tty settings.  I
am working on figuring out a work-around.

> 3. mushtool doesn't Zoom or Resize very well.  Newly exposed portion of
>    bottom window fills with random bits that look like a font table, or a
>    running count, or both.  Resizing and moving the individual subwindows 
>    can be fun, too.
yeah -- residual effect of sun not supporting some lower level sunwindows
routines.  I appologize.  Much of these bugs will go away once mush is
upgraded to sunview.

> 4. Why do mouse cursor buttons move when in the headers display?  (I did
>    figure this one out, but it sure seems strange.)
It's to demonstrate that you can use/choose any of the three mouse buttons
as actions on messages.  Place the mouse over a message and the left button
will read it, the middle will delete it, and the third will give you a menu
of options to do for that message.

> 5. Not enough confirmation of expensive operations.  Mush is too eager to 
>    rewrite things (not just the mail spool file).
can you be specific?

> 6. does not allow ^Z if in background in parent window.
>    i.e. is not independent of parent window I/O.
>    i.e. tool should write NOTHING to invoking window.
>    (Actually, I suspect it writes its stuff to the CONSOLE [window], so
>    this might not be so important.)
pagain -- more sunwindows/sunview problems.  Not much I can do in most cases.

> 7. too much typing required: offenses against the maxim that I should never
>    have to tell the thing something it already knows.
>    e.g. chdir needs to list available directories,
like what -- list all possible files/directories in the current dir?
Nope -- It's too common to have way too many files in a directory that the
menus will overrun.  Also, you can set "cdpath" which grows the number of
directories by a "large" margin.

> 	folder needs an option to make a new one.
according to what?  You use "save" to make a new olderfolder.  there are
options to "save" to create a new folder according to the author's name
or the subject of the message.  No typing required.  In the "save:" text
item, you'd type the directory for the new folder to be saved (e.g. "+").

> 8. header display should initially position itself at the first new message,
>    or the first unread message, rather than the first message, like Berkeley
>    Mail does.  This, combined with the absence of a command to select the
>    first of the new/unread messages gets pretty annoying.

This is highly configurable, so I attribute this to pilot error.  However,
I do admit that the headers displayed non-optimal message order -- get the
latest patch(es) for better results in this case -- much work has been done
to improve this.

> 9. How do I enter ordinary mush commands from tool mode?  I couldn't find
>    a way to display all the variables, for example.
The "opts" button displays all the variables.  It's also scrollable..

Dan Heller	<island!argv@sun.com>