# UMN gopher revisited pt2


## Once more into the breach

There were still some anomalies in text string truncation which I was
unhappy to leave, causing me to dive back in to the code for a second
time.

I found a rather strange routine which would truncate menu titles at
the first occurrence of '/'. Rather than truncate from the end of the
line it would truncate what it needed after the '/'. It was an
unexpected behaviour, so I have removed it. The author should have
control over how their menu titles appear.

Also lines were being truncated at 'maxlength' and then having '..'
appended causing the line to again be too long. I have adjusted the
truncation to be 'maxlength-2' to account for this.

My original patch has been replaced with a combined one including the
above changes.

Now that I am a little happier with the client[1], and a patch[2] is
available to correct the problems, I have put my menu titles back to
69 characters.

Here is a before and after comparison screenshot[3] of current 
behaviour vs my patch on long menu titles.


## Usenet

I started a thread on comp.infosystems.gopher on this topic but
unfortunately it soon became more about criticism of the client and
its shortfalls (in their opinion). The fact that it ignores pages
full of type 'i' is an annoyance to many who like creating pseudo web
pages using menus. The fact that it was a deliberate design change by
the authors of the reference client and writers of the RFC maybe
tells you that they weren't intended to be used that way.


## Summary

I've done my bit to iron out some of the bugs. If everyone did this
then maybe the world would be in a much better state. Unfortunately
people seem largely content with complaining. 

*Bonus info*: You can change the index display in the left margin by
setting an environment variable. The default is ' %6d ', there are 8
columns to fill. 

    $export GOPHERMENUSTYLE=' [%4d] '
    
    $export GOPHERMENUSTYLE=' %5d) '


## References

![1](gopher://gopher.icu/I/files/gopher-menu3.png)
 [2](gopher://gopher.icu/0/files/0001-Removed-selected-item-indicator-from-left-margin-rep.patch)
![3](gopher://gopher.icu/I/files/gopher-menu4.png)