[Pan-users] Re: alternate editor??

[walt]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:03:31 +0000, Beartooth wrote:

> On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:50:25 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>> walt <address@hidden> posted
>> address@hidden,
> [...]
>>> If you open a new post (hit 'p') you will find the necessary items in
>>> the 'Edit' drop-down menu.  It's a bit hard to find.
>> 
>> Yes.  A bit hard to find, indeed.
>> 
>> Open a new post, Edit menu, Set Editor.  If you don't see the choice
>> you want there, Edit menu, Manage Editor List.  That'll give you a
>> place you can add your own editor to the list.  After it's in the list,
>> you can then choose it using Set Editor as above.
>> 
>> Hope that's transparent enough for you Beartooth.  If not, just reply
>> to that effect and I or someone will have another try at it. =8^)
> 
> Well, I tried it -- Walter's way, I think; maybe Loki's -- and don't
> remember for sure which of my machines I was on at the time. But I
> remember I couldn't tell whether it took.
> 
> Seems as if vi (or vim or whatever else Pan offered) ought to be pretty
> obviously different -- and it isn't ...

You betcha vi is different!  You couldn't possibly mistake it for the
built-in pan editor.  Most vi clones are not gui applications and thus
they need to be run in an xterm window.  (Charles included gvim in his
default list of editors, which *is* actually a gui version of vi.)

> Another trouble (which at least makes me thing it was on this same
> machine I'm using now) is that it did something ver-r-ry strange, and
> has just done it again.
> 
> I hit Edit, then either Set Editor or Manage Editor List; and what it
> shows me is weird. I thought at first it was just my .sig; but I just
> tried it again -- and it showed this message, as far as I had gotten
> with it.
 
If you see anything except a small pop-up dialog showing you a list of
different editors then something is very wrong.

The danger of editing your pan config files is that they are all in
XML, which can easily be buggered if you don't know much about it.

Try calling up the list of editors one more time.  If it doesn't give
you a simple and obvious list of editors then I would guess that your
~/.pan2/posting.xml file is most likely broken due to handr-editing that
went a bit astray.

As an example, here is the first section of my posting.xml, which I
modified in the 'Manage Editor List' by adding nvi which is what I
actually have on my machine:

  <editors>
    <editor>gedit</editor>
    <editor>gvim -f</editor>
    <editor>kwrite</editor>
    <editor>xterm -e vim</editor>
    <editor active="true">xterm -e nvi</editor>
  </editors>

Every < and / character is important, and not intuitively obvious
if you don't know XML.  If in doubt, just move your ~/.pan2 out
of the way and let pan generate a new default .pan2 directory and
use that to play with until you are sure you understand your
situation.

BTW, my responses above were done in 'nvi' running in an xterm.
When I was done typing I quit nvi and I am now back in the pan
default editor finishing up this last paragraph.  I'm about to
hit the 'Send Article' button.....