GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 216251
Need Signature Editor and Randomizer
Last modified: 2013-09-10 13:53:01 UTC
Picture it: take the composer. Remove the From/To/CC/and Subject entries, and add a "Signature Name" entry and a "Include in Random List?" (or something) checkbutton. Voila! Now you have a lovely, html-capable, and ridiculously powerful signature editor. Combine this with a simple dialog which lists all of the signatures and whether or not they should be included in the set of randomized sigs, together with Add and Remove buttons, and Evolution would have the best signature handling of any of the mail clients I surveyed. I created a glade file of these designs, and a screenshot of it is available at: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo11/sig-editor.html I don't think this requires much hacking work at all.
For fun, I added a small hack to the composer that checks if the sig file is executable and, if it is, executes it and uses the output as the signature. This isn't nearly as nice as the UI suggested here, but it does give "power users" a way to have randomized sigs right away. :-)
Hm, I really don't like the composer to execute a file blindly like this. Please take this out. :-)
OK, but I suspect that the relatively small percentage of users who want to have randomized/variable sigs would want to use the output of a program rather than stuff from a canned list. (I have no evidence to back me up, of course... but I think that most people who have mentioned randomized sigs on the mailing lists have explicitly talked about wanting to execute a script or something.) This doesn't mean that the list editor/randomizer as proposed by Anna isn't a good idea. I think they both can coexist. I'd suggest either: (1) Adding an "execute" toggle button to the account setup page where the sig files are specified. We could then execute the sig file iff "execute" is set and the file actually is executable. This would be very easy to implement. (2) Leave the feature in there for "power users" by requiring a magic environment variable to be set. Something like EVOLUTION_PLEASE_EXECUTE_MY_SIGNATURE_FILE, maybe? :-) (Also, if we do allow generated sigs, we should probably limit them to N lines, where N is a sufficiently non-annoying integer.)
/me discovers bug 216066.
it lives now in own branch and once I resolve remaining issues I am going to merge it to head. it includes scripting and randomly selected signature features ;-)
Since this is done, closing the bug.
Hmm. What is currently implemented is not quite finished. Radek and I discussed which changes still need to be made...is it inappropriate to reopen until those changes are fixed? I don't want them to be forgotten.
Actualy I think I've made all changes we have discussed together (signature name in editor, format switching in editor, plus something more which I don't remember already ;) Another thing is that with new config dialog, old code needs to be probably little updated. Did I forgotten anything?