[26] in bug-owl
owl bug reports and feature requests based on 1.1.1-beta
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Mon Jun 24 14:15:32 2002
Message-Id: <200206210159.VAA12611@athenaphobia.mit.edu>
To: bug-ktools@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:59:34 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
Resent-To: bug-owl-mtg@spatula-city.mit.edu
Resent-From: "James M. Kretchmar" <kretch@MIT.EDU>
Hi Kretch,
Here's the list of things I've noticed/wanted while testing owl-1.1.1-beta.
I'm currently using 1.1.2-dev and know that some of these are already dealt
with. If I find spare time to become one with the code, I might try
implementing some of the features. If so, I'll send patches, but I seem never
to get around to spare time projects.
You're doing a fantastic job with owl - it's my favorite new program!
Mitch
BUG: There's a problem with scrolling. The best way I can characterize it is
that on a screen where the main window was 15 lines tall and the typing window
was 8 lines tall (it was a full console screen), whenever the last zephyr on
the screen was long enough (enough lines) that it extended beyond the bottom
of the screen and the cursor reached it before scrolling, attempting to move
to the next zephyr by using the down arrow doesn't update the screen (except
that the pointer disappears, and the status bar indicates that you're on a
later zephyr). Sometimes scrolling 20 or so zephyrs further down would cause
an update (not sure why). One way to get around it sometimes was to scroll
back up enough zephyrs that when you go back down, the problem zephyr doesn't
end up truncated at the bottom of the screen.
BUG: When I run owl, it doesn't register me as zlocatable anywhere. I have
startuplogin and shutdownlogout set to "no", but changing those temporarily and
restarting didn't change this. 'zctl show exposure' tells me I'm realm-visible.
BUG: After a console message was displayed (maybe an afs time sync message,
I forget), CTRL-L failed to repaint the end of the status bar (at least the
last character). In fact, CTRL-L doesn't seem to completely clean up usually
for me.
BUG: After tickets (actually tokens) expire, you may be unable to run your
zsigproc, and so owl sends your message with no zsig. This is a fine failure
mode, but the AFS permission denied error message is spewed uncleanly (and then
CTRL-L doesn't repaint everything nicely). It would be good if owl caught
error messages from anything it spawns and displays them nicely, either in
the typing window, an admin zephyr, a popup, etc. Maybe where to spit out
error messages could even be an option.
BUG: If you surround some of a zephyr with, for example, @foo[ ... ] in your
formatting function, an unsuspecting zephyr that comes in which contains a
closing square bracket will inadvertently end that part of your formatting, and
your closing brace will be printed after the zephyr.
FEATURE REQUEST: Display the Owl ID for the current message in the status bar.
This is so you can easily scroll to a particular zephyr you remember when you
change views.
FEATURE REQUEST: A "jump" command to jump to a zephyr with a given Owl ID.
FEATURE REQUEST: Colors! (I know you've done this. Yay!)
FEATURE REQUEST: Keep track of the last known position (which zephyr you were
last on, or if it's gone, find the next one still unexpunged) in each view,
and when you return to a view you've used before, go back to the last position
instead of the top.
FEATURE REQUEST: An option to autoscroll. That is, if this option is on, and
the current zephyr is the last one received, when a new zephyr comes in, act
as if the user had hit the down arrow. Don't do anything special if the user
isn't on the last zephyr; then they're probably moving around themselves.
FEATURE REQUEST: Or maybe just behavior change... don't have receiving a ping
beep, even if you beep on personals. I guess maybe it could be an option.
FEATURE REQUEST: Since many people (me included) seem to wrap zephyrs around
80 columns when using a client that doesn't autowrap for them, using the
default owl format that indents zephyr message text causes some of the output
to be off the right end of the screen a bit too often. This is of course
fixable by redefining the message formatting function in .owlconf, but it'd be
nice if the default didn't have this problem. I'm not sure if it would be
better to outdent text and indent headers, or to rewrap incoming zephyrs, or
something more exotic.
FEATURE REQUEST: A trigger so that you can define a function in .owlconf to be
run when you change current zephyrs. Mostly, I'd like to be able to change
what's on the status bar so that it contains info about the current zephyr.
I had envisioned being able to set a dynamic string for appendtosepbar, for
example "$owl::time", and have it update itself on change of current zephyr,
but explicitly setting it in a function that runs with each change would work
too.
