Re: lynx-dev TEXTAREA (was Re: LYNX-DEV Using Lynx woth web "forums")

[Howard Kaikow]

As the instigator of this discussion, I'll point out that I too dial in to
a shell account, then access lynx that way, with pico set as hte editor
that gets used in mail and trn and ...

I ran into another reason to faciliate editin te TEXTAREA today.

In Symantec's AskaTech forum, when you Reply to a posting, the forum
automatically "quotes" the messagetowish you are replying with > characters.
That's fine for a lot of cases, but it is rather tedious to delete unwanted
text in the lynx implementation of the TEXTAREA. Spawning an editor would
faciliate that.

Of course, I have now discovered how to access the Symantec forums via
newsgroups so thart's what I'll do instead until lynx can be modified.



At 01:47 PM 4/24/1998 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
>to follow up on what Rob said:
>> Benjamin C. W. Sittler wrote:
>> > 
>> > [spawning external editors]
>> > 
>> > Would this satisfy the standards?
>> 
>> It would satisfy me, but then I run my own mahcine - what about people
>> on shell accounts?  I can't imagine most administrators would be happy
>> about letting arbitrary people have access to a text editor (which is
>> essentially an unrestricted shell) from lynx...
>
>For shell customers like me, you get to a command shell first and
>go to lynx from there.  Editing text files is one of the least of
>the things you can do.  But in particular, I have Lynx and Elm
>trained to use the same odd text editor and the ability to pick
>that means a lot to my ease of use (it emulates WordStar keys).
>
>Lynx is running as me and the editor would be running as me.
>This is not unrestricted access.
>
>Anonymous-use clients where Lynx _is_ the shell is another story.
>
>Some people (not me) know how to create a jail where lynx and a
>few selected helpers are held captive.  That may be more work
>than the freenet sysop can devote to the problem.  
>
>Making the external-editor capability something one can compile
>out has been discussed as the appropriate accomodation for those
>with editor-as-security-leak concerns.  Even if this is what is
>offered to them, a configure option for hard-coded descent into
>(statically linked) Pico instead of the linewise text entry we
>now have for TEXAREA would IMHO be better.
>
>Al
>
>