[Pan-users] Re: Feature request for Pan Beta

[Duncan]

"Artur Jachacy" <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 27 Jun 2006
23:19:35 +0000:

> On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:31:56 -0700, walt wrote:
> 
>> Brad Sims wrote:
>>> On the post editor, could we get a line number and column number at the
>>> bottom somewhere?...

+1 here!

>> I always enable that feature in emacs for general-purpose editing, but I
>> confess I've never felt the need in a newsreader.  Can you share with us
>> how/why you would use it?
> 
> 
> I can share with you how I used it in earlier versions of Pan: sometimes
> when I copied text from the Web or other sources into a message, it would
> contain characters outside of the character set I used for posting to
> Usenet. Upon sending a message Pan would warn me that such an offending
> character is located in line X, column Y. Having column and line numbers
> at the bottom of the editor window greatly sped up finding those
> characters.

Unfortunately, the old line/column error didn't work, here, It always said
line 1, column 34273 or some such, which clearly wasn't correct! =8^(  I
believe the problem was likely a 32-bit/64-bit thing, as I'm on AMD64.  I
always had to either trial&error or visually search for the "strange"
character, which often turned out to be in the quote attribution line due
to a character not in the configured charset, so it wasn't /quite/ as bad
as it could have been.  Fortunately, the new-pan choice of UTF-8 means that
shouldn't be much of a problem any more. =8^)

That said, especially the column count did occasionally come in handy,
One use is for things like ascii-art or the like, where noting the
column number to get the right number of spaces on the next line can be
faster than trying to hit it visually, slowing down as one gets close. 
Another use is when manually wrapping pasted text, particularly when it's
line formatted output you don't want to break up too much and where 100
chars might be acceptable, but where there are a few lines of several
hundred chars that you /do/ want to breakup (perhaps with an indent on the
continued lines to show it).

I didn't use the feature often and hadn't yet missed it, but it was very
convenient to have when it /was/ of use, and I'm sure I would have
eventually needed it, looked for it, missed it, and filed a request of my
own, if this one hadn't come up first.



-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman