What I Learned Today

The mouse has its uses: surfing the web, editing images in GIMP, and doing layout in OmniGraffle are all far more convenient with point-and-click interactivity. But when I’m working with text, I have a definite keyboard-bias. I want to be able to keep my hands on the home row so that I can alternate between entering text and “meta” activities (file opening, file saving, moving text around, searching, copying, pasting, etc.) without having to move a hand to the mouse. This bias may also go back to my early college days, when Internet access came by dialing in over a modem, with a terminal connection (no SLIP yet!), so I learned to edit files using emacs (sans menus) and to send or receive email using Pine. Today, I find that working in graphical apps that were designed to take the place of these text-based options slows me down significantly. I can’t get around in Word without shifting over to the mouse or the arrow keys; I can’t save emails to folders without clicking and dragging.

The email problem has been particularly thorny. I use Pine when I want to file messages away from my inbox and into folders. I would just use Pine all the time, except that I really need to be able to search for messages with certain content, and I didn’t know how to do this with Pine. The w key lets you search through the current message, or the current folder listing, but it doesn’t search across a whole folder’s contents.

But yesterday that all changed. I learned how to search with Pine! And here it is:

Hit ; (select) then t (text) then a (all text), and then your search phrase. All matching messages are marked with an “X” and, since they are selected, can be “zoomed” by hitting z. This restricts the display to the selected subset of (matching) messages. Hitting z again zooms back out to the full folder.

I love this. It’s so amazingly fast! It feels like flying! I can zero in on the messages I want with ease and speed. And there are options: instead of [a]ll text, you can restrict the search to the To/From/CC/Subject/etc. fields. You can even go up to your list of folders and search across all of them, or [z]oom in on a subset and search those, etc. I’d used the select facility in Pine before, but only for selecting groups of messages for mass filing or deleting (also very handy), which meant selecting by Number or Date. I’m thrilled to have learned how to select by Text (content).

Update: I forgot to mention that for the ; key to work, you have to go into your Pine preferences (from the main menu, [s]etup, [c]onfig), page down to “Advanced Command Preferences” (or [w]hereis ‘aggregate’, to let Pine find it for you), and check the box next to “enable-aggregate-command-set”).