[Pan-users] Re: Shortcuts gone?

[Duncan]

"Mick Semb Wever" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:57:22
+0000:

> It's been a while but I've subscribed again to the Pan users list, but
> don't worry i've been a faithful pan user in the background all this time
> It took the recent improvements/rewrite to get my attention back to the
> community, and it's been well worth it after reading just a few of
> Duncan's posts :-)

=8^)

> Something I noticed very quickly, and am hoping is easily fixed, is I no
> longer appear to have a shortcut combination for a number of actions...
> Those most missing are the "Get Headers..." actions, especially "Get
> Headers for subscribed groups".

You are in luck! =8^)  Due to the way the menus are laid out, the
shortcuts for header fetching don't show, but the old default shortcuts
apply: "a" for selected group (unfortunately, only one group can be
selected at a time, ATM), "shift-a" for subscribed groups. I don't remember
for sure when this returned, but it should be there since 0.105 at least.

Customized hotkeys has also returned, altho it's a bit more difficult to
set it up, now.  It doesn't appear you can customize them from the PAN GUI
as you could with old-pan, but you can still change the accels in
accels.txt yourself.  As before, a line beginning with a ";" is a comment,
and pan dumps the defaults as comments giving you something to modify.  As
before, pan re-dumps the file in its own order at every close, killing any
order changes or comments you've made on your own, so you must either use
your text editor's search function (best if you are only changing one or
two things), or copy the file and make your changes in the copy, then copy
it back every time you change something.  Pan remembers the settings when
it started and saves them back on close, but no comments or change to the
order you made are retained.

Here, I make quite a few changes, so I use the separate file and copy
method.  I took the time to reorder all the actions as they are on pan's
menus, so I can easily find them, and I have a table with all the accels
and which ones are used, so it's easier to figure out what I want to use
is free or already in use.  The table looks something like this:

; ********* Used Accel table *********
; Char  Pln     Ctl     Shf     CtlShf  Alt     CtlAlt  AltShf  CtlAltSh
; a     a       c-a     s-a             a-a     ca-a    as-a    cas-a
; b     b
; c     c
;

That shows all the "a" combos in use (after my mods) except for cs-a, but
only the plain "b" and "c" accels used, the other combos free to be
assigned as desired.  (Alt isn't used at all by default, thus the title
line only extending thru ctrl-shft.)

FWIW, after my accel changes, the various "a" mods do variations on two
things.

First, from my time on MSWormOS, I'm used to c-a being select all, so I
have that mapped to select-all (body).  ca-a then equates to
alternate-select-all, or select-all headers.  Shift is the reverse or undo
key, so cas-a is mapped to unselect-all-headers.

Second, I use "a" as short for "article".  "a" therefore maps to "next
article", s-a "undoes" that, so previous article.  The alternate "article"
action is "unread" (I use next article more frequently than next-unread,
thus unread is the alternate), so a-a maps to next-unread-article.  as-a
is "alternate previous article" or "parent article".

You will note that I remapped a and s-a, so those can't get headers any
longer.  No matter, as to get headers, I use... "h" (for the selected
group) or c-h (for subscribed groups).

Next group and next unread group of course get g and alt-g, respectively,
and next thread and next unread thread predictably get t and alt-t. 
Entirely systematic, but as you can see, I diverge rather drastically from
the defaults, so I'm very glad to have accel customizations back!  It
should also be obvious why I need that table to track what accels are used
and which ones are free! =8^)

BTW, if anyone's interested, I could post my accels.txt file, rather than
others having to duplicate all my work, and all the time I spent
(literally hours) coming up with a workable scheme.  To this point, I've
always supposed no one would be interested, but after explaining the
above, perhaps someone is, and it'd be a shame for them to go to all that
work if so, when I already did it.

> ps another question: is there any way of getting pan to wrap my
> signature?

I simply use a text file, with newlines where I want them in the text file.
In your profile, set the sig type to text file, and put the path to it in
the signature box.  Works just fine, here.  The result you can see below,
as it appears both you and I do the list thru gmane.org.  =8^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman