Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 8, 2020 0:19 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Better tools for kernel developers by rgmoore
Parent article: Better tools for kernel developers

> though these are how to set the default rather than how to do it for an individual message.

Thanks for the link. I was afraid it might only be settable globally. This related directly to my point below...

> That said, even with old-fashioned plain text quoting, there were plenty of people who top posted because it was faster than quote/reply formatting.

That's true and it doesn't bother me at all - providing they manage to communicate clearly.
I really don't care about the format, but I would like people to think about the message that they want to send, and then to create the message accordingly.
This means they need the tools available to create a useful message. Sometimes top-posting is a perfectly good way to send a message, sometimes interleaving is best. In the cases that I can think of that particularly bothered me, my correspondent clearly *was* trying to communicate usefully, but were impeded by their tool.
Having the tools available needs them available on a message-by-message basis, not as a global setting.

Having quote-with-prefix/quote-without-prefix/don't-quote as a global setting is a bit like having reply-to-sender/reply-to-all/forward be a global setting. (or html/plain-text being a global setting!!!)

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Mar 3, 2020 17:09 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

If you set it to "prefix each line", the precise behaviour depends on whether the original message is plain text or HTML, so you don't get the > prefixing for HTML emails (instead you get a coloured border on the side, which is inoffensive and actually quite useful). It's not quite as good as if it let you set this per message, but in practice the way it works seems basically sane and actually a fairly reasonable approach.

Also, when replying to a plain text email, it defaults to plain text so you don't need to change anything.

I don't really want to defend Outlook too much since I kind of hate it, mostly for reasons not covered in this thread, but in this particular way I think its reputation is a bit unfair.