Re: External viewers; Select-by-Copy

[Mark T. B. Carroll]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:04:08 -0500 "Mark T. B. Carroll" <mtbc@ixod.org> 
> wrote: 
>
> MTBC> Two things that Gnus does that really annoy me are:
> MTBC> * If I select text in a message, only that text is quoted when I reply.
>
> That's a feature, I'm not sure why it should be changed.  Why is it
> harmful?

Featurism is in the eye of the beholder. Some applications, in my view,
get steadily worse in the development that happens after the initial
mature versions! This particular `feature' is never what I want. I copy
and paste fragments of articles in checking them out in other
applications, taking notes, etc. But then the selection has happened so
when I get to replying, it just quotes a little bit of the article, so I
have to undo the selection first, whether by going to some other article
then back to that one, or using M-u to mark it unread, quit the group
altogether, reenter it and go back to the article, or whatever. Maybe
there's an easier way to get rid of the selection, but a high fraction
of my selecting has nothing to do with what I might want to quote in
reply, so having to undo it just causes me extra work for no gain.

(nip)
> I think to correct that, the child process needs to disassociate itself
> from Emacs as its parent and that's pretty complicated (requires C calls
> that are not available in ELisp AFAIK).

Oh, that's a bit unfortunate! What happens is it starts up a web
browser, say, then I get reminded of or linked to other things I want to
check out, and in the same session after a while I'm now looking at
things that are nothing to do with what I originally launched from
emacs. This is especially bad with things like web browers, Acrobat
Reader, etc., where, when I view different things from outside emacs,
those attempts to view things attach to the existing emacs-spawned
process instead of spawning a new viewer, and then they want to die with
an application that never had anything to do with them.

Mark