Re: Word Non-Clones (Was: Re: (OT) Mailing Lists reflect on Developers)

From: Robert B. Waltz (waltzmn@SKYPOINT.COM)
Date: Tue Aug 01 2000 - 22:12:05 AEST


On 8/1/00, Nic Sanctum wrote:

>On Mon, 31 Jul 2000 12:19:31 -0500, "Robert B. Waltz" <waltzmn@SKYPOINT.COM>
>wrote:
>
>>I'd love to use BBEdit (or Nisus) to write my e-mail, then send it
>>via Eudora. (And before you ask why, in that case, I don't use NESY,
>>that's easy: I want no part of a program which encourages styled
>>e-mail, and I want the filtering options of Eudora.)
>
>BBEdit is a text editor. NW is a word processor and is designed for
>preparing printed pages, BBEdit focuses on providing means of
>producing and changing content. Thus BBedit does not offer fancy
>formatting capabilities, headers and footers, graphic tools, a
>thesaurus and other staples of most word processors.

Of course, Nisus doesn't have enough layout tools to do any serious
layout. Not at the level *I* do things, anyway. And all those other
features are useless in non-styled e-mail. :-) The thing is,
Nisus has some wonderful tools for preparing e-mail (GREP, macros,
etc.), then shoots itself in the foot with styled text and
such. What is really needed is a beefed up version of QUED/M
which can be used to edit e-mail text easily. This may be
possible with OS X. It's not really possible now.

>It appears that you neither want or need these things in an email
>client, so Mailsmith would be worth considering. This means that you
>would have the same text engine as BBEdit (both products are from Bare
>Bones) and you get access to all those nifty things like shift
>left/right, zap gremlins, keyboard text selection, grep search etc.
>all from within Mailsmith.
>
>As a Eudora user for 8 years, I can say with confidence that the
>filtering capabilities of Mailsmith are far more advanced than those
>found in any other email client. Mailsmith offers grep filtering and
>is well worth checking out.

There are two problems with Mailsmith. One is so critical that I
cannot use it: It doesn't allow queue control. (At least, the version
I tried didn't.) In Eudora, you can queue a message and say when you
want to send it -- or even say that you don't want to send it. I
*need* that. I loved Mailsmith -- until I discovered that. :-(

Also, while Mailsmith has GREP, it's BBEdit-style GREP. I much
prefer Nisus GREP. :-)

But I will admit that I don't like the Mailsmith approach. Where
possible, I *like* the idea of unix specialized tools. Mailsmith
uses a lot of BBEdit code. Better for it to use BBEdit *whole* --
or to use hooks to allow the use of any other text editor. This
doesn't stop me from using Mailsmith; I turned away from it
because of the queueing problems. But it irks me to have two copies
of the same code sitting around on my machine.

To return to an earlier subject: OS X will make this sort of
integration easy. Will anyone take advantage of that? I'd view
it as a real opportunity for Nisus. NESY sort of implements this
idea, but without the features I want or need. OS X makes it
much easier. Will Nisus produce a text-editing micro-app (QUED/M,
only in more finished form)? I wish they would....


--
Bob Waltz
waltzmn@skypoint.com

"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."



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