[Pan-users] Request: detachable windows and smart wrapping

[Lauri Alanko]

Hello.

I have been trying Pan every now and then for over a year now, and
every time I'm immediately turned off by some glaring interface
problems, which I've always thought must be so obvious that they'll be
fixed really soon. Apparently not.

The first one: it is silly to constrain the whole application to one
window, which then can be split to panes in one of a limited number of
layouts. The group selector, message selector and message view are all
separate visual components, and there's no reason to put them
together. Their layout is better left to the window manager, so the
user can place them as desired. I for one use Ion, which is a
pane-based window manager, and it is _much_ more user-friendly at
customizing layouts than Pan is.

So there should definitely be a "separate windows" option, where all
the three components are given their own X windows.

Another thing. The "wrap" feature seems utterly braindead to me.
Unless I'm completely mistaken, it uses some heuristic magic to
partition a message into paragraphs, and then renders those paragraphs
into lines whose width is predetermined in the preferences as a number
of characters. I can't see any sensible use for this feature. You just
switch one fixed width (~80 columns) to another. Proportional fonts
still look crappy because there's no right justification.

The way it _should_ go, of course, is to autowrap the message
according to the current width of the message window. This would make
proportional fonts much more useful.

And in addition to automagical paragraphization, explicit soft
newlines as specified by RFC 2646 should probably also be supported.

Am I the only one who would find these features useful?


Lauri Alanko
address@hidden