Re: Quoting and deleting // was Rules

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 10:43:20AM +0930, Adrian Morgan wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
> 3) Therefore I have to delete the margins manually. Unfortunately,
>    as Pine resides on a Unix server, the <del> key doesn't do what it's
>    bl%dy well supposed to do - it behaves as though it were <backspace>
>    (stupid, stupid).
Ctrl-D achieves the effect of the <del> key that you want.

> And because you can't use the mouse interactively
>    with Telnet/Pine (except for copying text), I can't highlight the
>    margin and select 'cut' or anything sensible like that.
Ctrl-^ (that's Ctrl-shift-6 for US keyboards) marks the start of a
selection; after marking the selection, reposition your cursor to the end
of what you want to cut and hit Ctrl-K. I know this isn't the most obvious
thing, but Pico (Pine's internal editor) at least isn't *that* braindead
not to have this feature! :-)

> No, the _only_
>    I can delete the margins is to go backspace, backspace, backspace
>    (repeat n times), down arrow, right, right, right (repeat n),
>    backspace, backspace, backspace, ..., down, right, right, right, ...,
>    and so on. It's a bl%dy nuisance and I have to do it _every_ time I
>    post!
Ctrl-J reformats the paragraph (a paragraph = anything between two blank
lines). Of course, this may totally screw up your quote characters if
you're using the ">  " quoting scheme that most email programs have, but
since you're cutting and pasting from another source, this shouldn't be a
problem.

> 4) Of course, since I copy/paste the message from egroups I also have to
>    add the quote marks in manually. Angled bracket, space, down, left,
>    left, angled bracket, space, down, left, left, angled bracket, sp ...
>    It's even more laborious than _that_, because I do an extra
>    <space>-<backspace> on each line to check that the text doesn't
>    dribble too close to the right margin.
Yes, this could be a problem :-/ I know how it feels -- been there, done
that. Good thing now I get mail delivered directly to my machine, although
my current mailer still uses Pico to edit mail messages.

> 5) The only saving grace is the delete-a-whole-line feature in Unix
>    programs, which is Crtl-K. This is useful for snipping.
[snip]

Ctrl-K means delete-whole-line only in Pine/Pico. Most Unix programs treat
it as delete-until-end-of-line. Still, it's good for snipping, as you
said. :-)

OK, as an example of what ctrl-J does in Pine, I've used it on your little
appendix below. As you can see, it totally munges up the ">  " quote marks
put there by my mailer; but since you're manually inserting the quote
marks anyway, you can avoid the problem by reformatting first and then
adding the quote marks.

> Appendix: Sample of raw text copied in from egroups:  >
--------------------------------------------------- > > probably possible
to tell the program not to do that, but I > find it's > simpler to select,
copy and paste the desired text into a > "new message".  Or > perhaps it's
a Yahoo thing.  Or, tell Conlang to send you > individual > emails, not
digest.  Today, there were only 100 or > so....:-[ > > -- > web.  | Here
and there I like to preserve a few islands of sanity > netyp.com/ | within
the vast sea of absurdity which is my mind.  > member/ | After all, you
can't survive as an eight foot tall > dragon | flesh eating dragon if
you've got no concept of reality.


More tips on how to use Pine without pulling your hair out:
Ctrl-A  Jump to beginning of line
Ctrl-E  Jump to end of line

This can be *very* time-saving when you're doing manual formatting (like I
often do).

Hope this helps reduce some of your frustration! :-)


T