GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 560480
[templates] Add quick choice of templates while composing new mail, just like signatures
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:45:51 UTC
Diego and other evolution developers, below is my short email to Diego about a feature request to the evolution template plugin. Hello Diego, First of all I would like to thank you for the template plugin. I think its fantastic and some thing I was waiting for in Evolution. In the past I worked with Pegasus mail and it also has a template function, only you would be able to make a text and set a keyword to this text. If you make a new email and say "template1" would be the keyword and press certain hotkeys it would expand into the template. Would it be possible to add something like this to the template plugin? Because besides a complete template you can quickly add common pieces of text. This is very useful if you have people asking the same questions like for instance if you would work at a helpdesk. Kim
Sounds interesting to me, I'm not aware of how the new composer works, doesn't sound too complicated nor trivial though.
I'm not sure about the whole keyword thing, but I can see a menu of templates in the composer being useful: Insert -> Template Body -> Template 1 Template 2 Template 3 ... Where the menu contents would be the subjects of messages in your Templates folder. Selecting one would insert the body of the template at the cursor. Of course there's all kinds of weird corner cases to consider. - What if the template is HTML and you're editing in plain text mode? Should we convert the whole message to HTML? - What if the template has addresses in To:/Cc:/Bcc:? Should we add the addresses to the message you're editing? - What if the template has attachments? Should we add the attachments to the message you're editing? ...etc... In other words, it may involve dissecting the template message and copying over the relevant parts. So then the question is which parts are relevant? Clearly stock replies is a useful feature. We just need to flesh out the details. What do other mailers do?
Sounds like a nice idea to implement. @kim Under Edit-> Plugins-> Templates, there's a configuration window. Have "template1" as your keyword, and paste the text you need to be replaced into the Value column. Create a new template and have $template1 in the body. So whenever you use this template, $template1 in the body of the mail would expand to the value you assigned to it. Bad bad workaround. Please don't kill me for it :) Right now tht's the best thing to do in your case and would work just fine. @mbarnes +1 the menu sounds like a good thing to implement. Other mailers need to check
*** Bug 559561 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It would be nice to have template drop down in compose window so that we can select template for sending new mail or replying any mail.
*** Bug 633335 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
...and keyboard combinations are covered in bug 681352. One request per ticket only. :)
With respect of replies, I just committed a fix for bug #602612, where the window with Alternative Reply contains also the selector of the template to be used. This selection is saved in settings, thus the next time the Alternative Reply is called it's filled with the previously chosen template. It's there to make things simpler. I know this is about the composer window, which is another story, but the changes from this older bug will help with this one too.
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