The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients

Posted Jun 29, 2004 23:17 UTC (Tue) by dcoutts (subscriber, #5387)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients

Evolution can send code patches without line wrapping. I do it all the time.
It's part of the formatting features, you can select a line/pargraph and from the combobox on the compose window's toolbar select 'preformat', which does just what you'd expect. It can also do a limited amount of other formatting (all in ASCII email mode) like bullet points, enumerated lists, indenting etc.

As for keyboard shortcuts I was under the impression that all gtk+/gnome programs could have menu shortcuts assigned. It was certianly the default in gnome 1.4 era. I believe the ability was turned off by default in gnome 2 (along with detachable menus & toolbars) because new users accidentally messed up their shortcuts and didn't realise how they'd done it. These days it's obviously too well hidden a feature.

Try: gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels --type bool True

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients

Posted Jul 1, 2004 16:35 UTC (Thu) by wcooley (subscriber, #1233) [Link]

Unfortunately, Evolution doesn't use GTK+ directly for the toolbars; it uses Bonobo, which doesn't work the same way. You have to edit XML files in /usr/share to change the keybindings, but I'm not sure if it actually works, because I tried and failed.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients

Posted Jul 1, 2004 18:16 UTC (Thu) by dbreakey (guest, #1381) [Link]

GNOME 2.4 and 2.6 are still capable of allowing keyboard shortcuts to be assigned arbitrarily, but it seems to have been globally turned off by default; you can either edit the appropriate GConf key (as indicated in the previous post), or download one of the 'advanced' configuration utilities, such as COnfigurator for Gnome. Incidentally, while the reconfigurability of shortcuts is a standard feature, it is apparently up to individual applications whether to permit it or not; I think that failing to allow it is a violation of the HIG guidelines, but I'm not sure. Then again, a quick review doesn't show anything.

Evolution, on the other hand, was not originally a GNOME application (strange, but apparently true, despite the fact that it used/uses extensive parts of GNOME; of course, I'm pulling this from a memory of a very old post, so I could be wrong). Now that it is being proposed as a standard component, for inclusion in 2.8, this lack of shortcut configurability may change. Or it may not, as I've also heard that the developers refuse to enable it due to the dynamic nature of the interface.

Personally, I hope they figure out how to solve any problems and enable this feature, as there are several shortcuts I'd love to change and/or add…