Re: [Pan-users] interface bug (or not?)

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson posted on Wed, 13 Mar 2024 21:18:33 -0000 (UTC) as
excerpted:

> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 10:53:44 -0000 (UTC), Duncan wrote:
> 
>> The other possibility would be adding smallish/mediumish sizes to
>> options
> 
> I think "configurable", either globally or per-group

I hadn't thought of per-group configurable for this.  I haven't thought 
through whether it'd be particularly useful as opposed to global config, 
but at least global config would be good.  The only reason I didn't push 
configurable more strongly is because I can't do that patch myself, and I 
prefer updating the hard-coded values to doing nothing at all, if no one 
else coded the patch required to make it configurable.

> and the save dialog should have an option to just view the attachment
> inline as an option.

That's a really useful idea -- useful enough and obvious enough now that 
it's presented, I'm jealous I didn't come up with it! =:^)

> The behavior as it is is a little confusing, that opening it triggers
> the 'save' dialog, but selecting it in the header pane and pressing
> 'enter' gives a different behavior (ie, showing the image inline).  It
> feels like pressing 'n' for the next message should have the same
> behavior as pressing 'enter' after manually selecting the message.

The current behavior is indeed confusing, agreed there.  But I don't see a 
way around the two differing behavior cases, because having pan not 
display the text (and image if there) by default on "smallish" would be 
seriously inconvenient, nor can I see doing away with at least /some/ sort 
of "don't just download insanely large posts without a prompt" behavior.

But your idea to add the view-inline option to the save dialog should 
dramatically improve the large-post experience and make it /somewhat/ less 
confusing, and if that's combined with making the small/medium boundaries 
configurable (or at least modernizing the hard-coded values), it should go 
quite some way to improving the overall experience. 

Additionally, a bonus to making the small/medium boundaries configurable 
is that there'd then be a natural place in the GUI to document the 
differing read/save behavior that's now undocumented, making it less 
confusing at least for those that explore config options! =:^)  (Option 
wording to be determined, but in /theory/ it could help...)

-- 
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