Lines starting with a greater-than symbol

Feature Proposal
1

I see how it adds a space before > on lines that would otherwise be quoted. Please don’t. It led to me sending a kinda poorly formatted email

2

When you quote message in Delta Chat, it formats the quote with > without prepending the space to it. On the receiving Delta Chat side, if message starts with such proper quote, it is assumed to be a quote of the In-Reply-To message, displayed as such and jumping to the original message when you click on it. To prevent > typed inside the message by user from triggering this behavior, DC uses “space stuffing”, which is a standard way to prevent > from being recognized as a quote: rfc3676 Clients which support format=flowed, such as Thunderbird, will not display the space, but neither will display the line as a quote.

If you want to quote a message in DC, there is a built-in way to do it, e.g. swiping the message on Android. The question is, why would you want to format the quote manually? Do you want to edit it before sending, quote some other message, or place the quote differently from the default way (bottom-posting)?

1 Like
3

Yeah, the space stuffing was frustrating, surprising, and embarrassing since I didn’t know what was gonna happen.

In this case, I was replying to a very long message and I wanted to quote just two sentences (separately) from it; I had pasted them in and put > in front.

1 Like
4

Since I wrote this, it has happened again and again that I’m replying to a long message and I only wanna quote one line and it’s super awkward with “citation marks” or something instead of the age old

greater than-format at the start of the line

Which works on Mattermost and here and in traditional email and on Reddit but Delta Chat actively messes with it by inserting a space. Frustrating :broken_heart:

1 Like
5

Unrelated, here are two other reply issues I run into:

  1. Delta Chat, when quoting, uses Full-Quote Over, Text Under. In some ways the worst quoting policy. (I know, I know, I’ve promised not to care about quoting policies.) But, when dealing with old school nerds, they want specific lines quoted, and when dealing with customer servicd bot, they want Text Over, Full-Quote Under. Neither of which is possible with Delta Chat—the former will be, if we ditch the space stuffing.

  2. I’ve generally been really happy with how Delta Chat by default doesn’t quote anything at all, relying on the recipient to use a MUA with a threaded view. And sometimes I wanna reply to a specific older message (just because I know the recipient uses a traditional MUA) but I can’t do that without quoting.

Now, normally, for both of these use cases I just go over to another MUA which is easier now that I’ve installed the same Autocrypt setup in both. :heart:

1 Like
6