Re: [Help-nano] getting nicely justified comments in an easy way

[Seb]

Hi Benno,


> Sorry, no.  Debian was frozen before nano-4.0 was released, so the new 
> Debian stable will ship with 3.2.

Thanks for the heads up. I downloaded nano-4.0's source code, compiled and 
installed it.

> You probably don't use the M-S toggle (to toggle smooth scrolling)

You're right.

> could do 'bind M-S softwrap main' and use Esc-S to toggle softwrapping, 
> which should be a bit easier to type.

Done, works fine. It is indeed easier for me.

> > Any chance of reproducing this clean appearance, or is it in the same 
> > category as introducing a '#' after a \n?
> It would be much harder to make than an automatic "#".  See attached 
> patch for a quick and dirty implementation of the latter.

Thanks for the patch. I did
        cd src && patch chars.c 00*.patch
then recompiled and reinstalled nano, but it doesn't work.

> But... you can file a feature request on Savannah if you want it and 
> think the feature would be useful to others too.

Simple as it may seem, it makes emails look great. When I used Pine, 
several people asked me how I did this. I was really disappointed when 
Alpine came along and didn't support this feature.

I see on Savannah that ^W^Y and ^W^V are no longer supported. ^Home and 
^End are more logical, but they take the hands away from the center of the 
keyboard. Esc-/ and Esc-\ do work, but so far I used the Esc key for 
switches: long lines, autoindent, softwrapping now. It doesn't feel right 
to use it to navigate the file. ^+Shift+Y/V would have made more sense. I 
wonder if the upsides to the code of eliminating ^W^Y really outweighs 
breaking compatibility with the entrenched habits of millions of users. 
There is no --oldskool option. And it's marked on Savannah as "Won't fix". 
I have been using ^W^Y for 24 years. Switching to nano-4.0 would be a pain 
for weeks, for no obvious upside.

^U no longer undoes ^J, I have to use M-U. Again ^+Shift+J seems more 
sensible.

Surely there will be other surprises.

If I did that to my users, a tenth of them would walk away feeling 
disrespected.

Clean code and aesthetics are fine, but focusing on users--of which there 
is an "installed base"--is fine also. I'm keeping nano-2.7.4 (and its 
sources) for now.


Kind regards,
Sébastien.