history
open love
by anders pearson
Tue 05 Feb 2002 16:50:39
i love open-source software. have i mentioned that lately?
i've been experimenting with different email clients lately and finally found one that does everything i need it to: GPG integration, decent IMAP support, no html support (i hate html email) and the ability to remap the keybindings so i can make it behave exactly like pine (i've been using pine from the shell on the mailserver for years but the connection between my cable-modem provider and columbia's network is spotty enough that typing over that connection has gotten annoyingly slow) which my fingers know mechanically.
after trying and discarding for one reason or another kmail, evolution, balsa, and schemes involving fetchmail with pine or mutt on a local machine, i tried <a href="http://www.tkrat.org/">TkRat</a>. it handles everything i need it too and is extremely lightweight to boot. it's written in TCL using the Tk widget library so it doesn't <em>look</em> very pretty but it's quite functional.
after using it for a couple days, the only problem i had with it was that it has these huge tooltips for pretty much every part and no option to turn them off. the tooltips are nice for about the first hour you're using it and figuring out where all the features live but gets annoying after that. it gets to the point where you have to make sure to move the mouse out of the window all the time to keep what you're reading or typing from being obscured by some huge tooltip explaining in depth that the "send" button is used to "send" the email or something retarded like that.
luckily, because TkRat is open-source, i was able to do a quick grep through its source code, find the function that shows tooltips, or "balloon help" as they refer to it (called 'rat_balloon::Show') and add a 'return' to the function before it actually shows anything on the screen, essentially nullifying the tooltip functionality. i don't even know TCL but i was able to do this entire operation in about a minute, making the program immensely more usable to me.
with closed-source software, you're stuck with whatever microsoft or adobe or whoever decides to give you.
if i get ambitious enough to learn some TCL basics i'll add a preferences option for tooltips and contribute the patch back to the project so other people can benefit from it.
comments
Mark Boudreau - Tue 05 Feb 2002 16:51:39
Have you thought about configuring the front page stories so that only a small portion appears on the front of the site, and readers could go to the full posting to see the rest?anders pearson - Tue 05 Feb 2002 16:53:39
if i added that, i probably wouldn't make it the default. i think of thraxil less as a news site (which that would seem to go with) and more of a collaborative weblog. but it might be worth adding as an option that you can set it to.sarah - Tue 05 Feb 2002 16:52:39
I went so far as to install tk/tcl stuff for a moo client long ago so I could chat with some family. Scary stuff, but I can imagine the joy that it must be in the hands of the afficinado. Talking about all this blissful hacking in the face of unconfigurability... what's the state of the Thraxil? Developmentally speaking.anders pearson - Tue 05 Feb 2002 16:54:39
well, i just put in some new code for filtering dangerous html out of posts so it's getting closer to where i can release the source code. pretty much the main thing still to do is recode markov. aside from that, some of the diary templates could use some massaging, the whole diary management system is still not entirely figured out. and of course, i need to document stuff and clean up the code. what outstanding issues do people think are the most important for me to get working?