On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 04:56:24PM -0800, Frederik Eaton wrote: > Note that (1) it isn't obvious that another question won't follow the > "Postpone..?" Well, ok, can you provide an example of a question which might sensibly follow that one? > one, (2) as I've said, it isn't obvious that the alternative to > postponing is discarding My question is, again, what other sensible alternatives exist? You see, I think it is obvious, on account that I can't imagine what else could possibly follow. But I'm open to the possibility that I just haven't thought of something sensible, even though it may exist... > (postponing could be the same as exiting message composition mode - > this would be similar to the gnus UI, in which case 'n' would mean > 'cancel'), See, right there, I gotta disagree. That would be canceling, NOT postponing. Postpone means to delay what you're doing. Cancel means to abort, destroy, or delete. In the former case, you pick up where you left off. In the latter case, you must start again from scratch. That's not postponing. This is not confusing, unless you don't know the meaning of one of these words, as I said before. > (3) in 99% of other contexts, if a user asks to quit, and the > application wants to verify that it is ok to discard unsaved data, > the question takes the form of some variation of "Save changes?" - > mutt's "Postpone..." is fairly far from that pattern. But it is not so different from the behavior of a number of other mail clients. For example, IIRC if you click on the x button of a mozilla mail composition window, the dialog box which pops up asks you something like, "Do you want to save this message in the drafts folder?" That's a longer way of asking, "Do you want to postpone this message?" I just don't see any confusion here. Not to mention the fact that this is spelled out in rather a lot of detail in the manual. 2.6. Postponing Mail At times it is desirable to delay sending a message that you have already begun to compose. When the postpone-message function is used in the compose menu, the body of your message and attachments are stored in the mailbox specified by the ``$postponed'' variable. This means that you can recall the message even if you exit Mutt and then restart it at a later time. [lengthy continuation omitted] There's also more about this in the reference sections, 6.3.166, 6.3.167, and 6.4.8. Now, of course, you read the manual, so you know that this is what postpone does, right? ;-) So, then, if you DID press your "quit" key, and you DON'T want this behavior, what do you expect will happen? > (here is Thomas' response:) I already read Thomas's response. Frankly, I *have* lost messages at this prompt, but not because I was confused about what would happen if a pressed a particular key; it was because I simply had a brain-fart and pressed the wrong one. And -- no offense to Thomas -- IIRC he's not a native English speaker (though he does speak English pretty well for a foreigner!) so he might be more susceptible to making those kinds of mistakes. Or not, I dunno... -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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