On Feb 19, 2014, at 12:10 PM, Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
I guess I'd want to know what people want to happen when they "show" a message with some images or PDFs attached to it. Let's figure out what UI people have in their minds and work from there.
And this alludes to my comments about making the commands a bit more scripting friendly. Not that they aren't, but they could be tuned a bit to make them better. And your comments about the UI lit up a big light bulb, and finally made me realize something that has been nagging me for a long time. And that is how the interactive interface is slowly starting to pick away at the "batch" functionality (for lack of a better word) of the commands. The functionality needed to support friendly interactive use is sometimes at odds with what makes sense for scripting. When you make a given command try to do both interactive and batch well, this tension can result in it doing both poorly. Or at least inconsistently. I suppose one of the things I would give a hard think is in re-evaluating the line between programs intended for scripting and those intended for interactive UI purposes. Once upon a time, exec() was a very expensive system call, thus embedding the 'UI' behaviour into the existing commands made some sense. But today, fork()/exec() and spawn() overhead in the MH environment would be invisible on all but the most grossly underpowered hardware. Maybe it's time to rethink where the UI functionality lives, with a view to creating a new set of commands that become the interactive front end, calling out to the traditional commands to do the back end grunt work. This would allow the non-UI bits to be cleaned up for scripting use. I have no specific ideas about this at the moment; this all just coalesced in my brain a few minutes ago while reading Ken's message. --lyndon
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