open love
By anders pearson 05 Feb 2002
i love open-source software. have i mentioned that lately?
<p>i’ve been experimenting with different email clients lately and finally found one that does everything i need it to: <span class="caps">GPG</span> integration, decent <span class="caps">IMAP</span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <span class="caps">TCL</span> using the Tk widget library so it doesn’t <em>look</em> very pretty but it’s quite functional. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span class="caps">TCL</span> but i was able to do this entire operation in about a minute, making the program immensely more usable to me. </p>
<p>with closed-source software, you’re stuck with whatever microsoft or adobe or whoever decides to give you.</p>
<p>if i get ambitious enough to learn some <span class="caps">TCL</span> basics i’ll add a preferences option for tooltips and contribute the patch back to the project so other people can benefit from it.</p> Tags: opensource email tkrat tcl