Extra Pepperoni

I got Exceed, and after reassigning my left modifiers to X instead of Windows, kate is quite reasonable. It uses kompare for graphical diff, and comes with some CVS plugins. I prefer BBEdit’s diff display (although BBEdit’s diff has been broken for years). I’m not sure how I managed to view a couple windows in xemacs from kompare, but I can probably avoid that in the future…

kate is clunkier and less featureful, and not as configurable as I expect — the commands I want to assign to the toolbar, for instance, are not available in that context. On the other hand, BBEdit doesn’t use a toolbar at all, and rearranging menus is only supported in limited ways, so I’m not convinced kate is inferior here — it may just feel like that to me as a BBEdit user. Hopefully Subversion support is available for kate, but that doesn’t actually matter to me right now.

I need to get Copy & Paste working between Windows (including PuTTY) and Exceed; hopefully this will be straighforward, but it doesn’t just work.

Per IDM, UltraEdit cannot be installed without admin rights, which I do not expect to get, so that’s out — at least until they offer an alternate installer.

kate icons are a bit fuzzy, but they fit the Linux aesthetic, and the fonts are very nice.

I can write Outlook rules to match on Subject strings, but it lacks “Starts with” instead of “Contains”, so I cannot specify original messages, and distinguish from Re: for replies.

The filter area shows a list of criteria with checkmarks at the top with blue underlines under the keywords. The bottom shows the same labels, with the same blue underlines. But at the bottom they’re “links” to dialog boxes for entering the criteria, while at the top the same “links” aren’t clickable. Way to mis-use a visual cue, and do it in the most confusingly inconsistent way possible!

Oh, and the rules dialogs are all modal, so once I start creating a rule, I cannot open candidate messages to confirm the rule matches.

I’m still aggravated that I cannot match on partial strings, like “The Notification Agent” or “root@” (acrosss multiple machines) in the From: line. Matching on Subject: (especially unanchored) is much less precise.

When I delete multiple messages, why does Outlook select a random message, instead of the next one?

In Conversation mode (which would be a lot more useful if it didn’t waste 2 messages worth of space per “Conversation”), if I use down-arrow to select the next conversation, it expands the conversation instead. Use left/right to collapse/expand converations — they aren’t needed for mailbox navigation! At least Control-KP+ expands all Conversations.

I hit the accursed 32k rules limit. Despite this post, our systems cap rules at 32kb total (client-side + server-side). Apparently this will go to 256kb, once we’re upgraded to Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007. In the meantime, I’m spending a significant amount of time every day trying to make Outlook 2003 do decent filtering, with very limited success. In particular, Outlook is apparently unable to filter From: “root@*” as a catchall. This would make alerts easier to parse, as distinct from human-originated messages. Yuck!