PE> you're always complaining about the user interface of PKT readers

Yep.

PE> (I'm not sure how you actually know this if you've never
PE> set up a point with messagebase etc),

Corse thats just you jumping to the conclusion I never have boy.

PE> but I am in the throes of hacking MSGED. What is wrong with it?

Its been a while now so its a bit hard to remember the specific
detail on that one now. And when I started offline main reading
I basically tried everything, all the QWKs and close like
BlueDribble and Silver Xpress and the point systems, so its hard
to keep clear in my mind just what each one did in detail.

Part of my object with the point mail systems is that they almost
invariably sit on top of a message base and it alone has problems
finding a decent one. *.MSG is an utterly geriatric dinosaur of an
abortion of an approach. Hudson can fang your bum in some situations,
and has actually fanged mine in some. Squish ditto as you found
yourself. Then there are the unique ones like PPoint which causes
inevitable problems if you want to do something it doesnt do, you
cant even just add a ute like you can with some of the more general
message base formats.

With some mail readers its just big chunks missing which have to be
kludged around like not having the personal mail extracted to its own
pseudo area. Or not having a spelling checker at all or when you get
one somehow, say with an addon, having it mindlessly check the spelling
of the quoted blocks that I dont give a stuff about the spelling of. Its
mostly this sort of major stuff that I hate most in the user interface
of the point mail readers.

But its also the general user interface stuff too. I went thru that
in detail comparing Emacs with Qedit and BlackBeard as editors.
Hotkeys alone do not a modern user interface make. There is a lot more
to a decent modern user interface than just user configurable hotkeys.

Then there is the windowing stuff. With OLX you can be reading
multiple areas at once, instant switch between them, with decent
high power searching etc.

That alone rules out many of the point mail systems, the lack of real
full horsepower searching in the message base. With the hits auto
extracted to a phantom area for convenient manipulation. With that
phantom area not actually being copys of the original messages.

I'll get the latest MSGED and refresh my memory if you like on the specifics.

--- PQWK202