[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Nicholas Chammas
<nicholas.chammas at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 5:04 PM Stefan Krah skrah.temporarily at gmail.com
> wrote:
>
> a) not top posting
>
> b) not full quoting the entire thread
>
> Sorry, by default Gmail hides the thread when replying so it’s easy to
> forget that you are re-mailing the whole thing out. So normally you would
> not even notice that someone has top posted or quoted the entire thread if
> you’re reading on Gmail’s web client. Chalk it up to my being a mailing list
> n00b.

Yeah, Gmail can be a pain. But it's good in so many other ways that I
keep using it. A couple of tips:

1) Turn off Rich Text by default, and if ever you see it active, turn
it off for that email. It's a lot easier to make sure you're quoting
properly etc when the email is in plain text mode.

2) If you're replying to just part of the message, you should be able
to highlight that part and click in the Reply box. (That might require
a config option - been ages since I set this up.) There'll be a couple
of blank lines at the top,  but you can either delete or ignore them,
and just hit Ctrl-End to start typing underneath (or insert text in
between different blocks).

3) To reply to the whole message, hit R or click in the box - and then
press Ctrl-A to "select all". This instantly expands out the quoted
text, making it easy to see what's worth trimming.

And either because of Monty Python or because of it being one of the
two hardest problems in computing, I said "a couple" and gave three.
Whatever. :)

ChrisA