Idiomdrottning’s homepage

Leave my quote lines alone

Update:

The following text is super obsolete.

First of all, Delta Chat did implement the fix I wanted.

Second of all, I have two other, better posts that mention the issue:

I forgot about this one when writing them.

I’m going to unindex / delist this one.

Original post

I can’t believe the resistance to this 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

It’s like, the cost/benefit ratio is completely lopsided. 💔

Just please please please change it 🙏🏻

The fact whenever I try to send a line that looks like this in Delta Chat, it gets tampered with, feels almost cruel and petty and mean spirited.

Like, what’s the harm? Just please let me send lines that look that way🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 There’s never anything bad that’s gonna happen from not tampering with these quotes.

Mirror universe Clippy: “Looks like you’re trying to write a quote line, I’d better silently change it to not be a quote line. Hehehehe. Only way to quote is to hit the FOTU button.”

This is actually what RFC 3676 intended. So the windmill I’m tilting at is not only one app of wrongness, it’s eighteen years of wrongness since it came out in 2004.

I even asked the guy who worked on the RFC, who very kindly replied (thank you for that) but… he doubled down on this madness! I was reading the source code of his email replies to me and I was like “See, these are the semantics I want; your mailer reflowed long lines, but kept > at the start of lines you quoted from me” and he was like inserting those is the job of the MUA. He used TOFU by the way. Which, I know traditional hacker culture says TOFU is worse than FOTU while I don’t care. I don’t care how you do it, I just wanna keep my own house in order and that sometimes means excerpting a single phrase with a > line. As is possible in traditional email, traditional paper letters, on Usenet, on Gemini, in Markdown, on Slack, on Discourse, on Reddit, on Stack Exchange, on Slack, on Mattermost, on Matrix, on the moon and the sun and the clouds and the pebbles and trees, on Mars, on Venus, on everything between us. Anywhere but in Delta Chat, where my arms suddenly get chopped off if I try it and I just come across as an embarrassing weirdo to the person on the other side. And I didn’t even know about it for the first year I was using Delta Chat (because it hides this tampering from the sender so I’m embarrassing myself unknowingly) but since I found out about it six months ago I’ve been trying to get this changed.

Like, in what universe is this a desired feature by an end user, someone who goes “Ah yes I’m really glad I don’t have to type space > in order to send space >, I only have to type >, and when I do type space >, I’m glad it still gets displayed as only >, and I’m sure happy I can’t manually quote a line!” That person is my enemy! Luckily, they don’t exist (or if they do, they’re like one out of forty trillion people) while the people who instead occasionally wanna, IDK, sometimes indicate that “hey, this thing you said earlier, this specific part”, those people? They are me 💔