Re: Get \201 when I edit mail

[Michael Welsh Duggan <md5i@cs.cmu.edu>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I've been thinking quite a bit about how to do article editing, and I
> just can't see any way to allow that in an elegant way -- especially
> with MIME gunk and MULE gunk in the way.
> 
> The two possible approaches that I see are these:
> 
> 1) When editing a MIME message, not necessarily a multipart one, but
>    that as well, we plop the user into something that looks more or
>    less like a Message buffer with the article in.  Multipart articles
>    are transformed into MML (text parts just get a "part" marker
>    before them and non-text parts get a part that has the contents in
>    an external file).  When finishing the editing, Gnus does what
>    Message does -- transforms the MML back into MIME.
> 
>    This approach means that the user has little actual control over
>    the details of the resulting article.  For instance, parts of the
>    result may be base64-d, etc.

How about the following approach?

When editing the message, the user sees basically what he would see in
the *mail* buffer were he creating the message in the first place.
Parts displayed inline normally remain inline, others get an MML tag.
The MML tags are uneditable (by default), and hitting `RET' or
clicking on the tag brings up the part in a seperate buffer
(unencoded).  This should then be editable, accepting changes with
`C-c C-c' and cancelling changes with `C-c C-k'.  The parts are cached
away in buffers when not being edited.  These buffers, and the main
buffer, are protected by `kill-buffer-query-functions' and
`kill-buffer-hook'.

Of course, you should be able to kill tags and their related parts as
well, and have an easy way to restore them before saving changes...

Now, this approach is what I would call an "easy" approach.  (From the
user's point of view.)  What it does not do, the way I have stated it,
is maintain part seperation between consecutive inlined parts.  This
may be a fatal flaw of some sorts...

-- 
Michael Duggan
(md5i@cs.cmu.edu)
.