[sylpheed:35770] Sylpheed

[cgw993 at aol.com]

I have noticed that Sylpheed's search is about a billion times faster and more reliable than Outlook 2010. Just wanted to say job well done to the developers.

How difficult would it be or is it, to make a minor change to the programming for a typical free software package like Sylpheed? I am hoping to find a general outline as to what major steps are involved.  For example as I understand it

Sylpheed is written in some computer language, I would guess C

How do you open the code, view the code to make a change? How would you save the code? I know these are extremely basic questions but I do not even know where to begin.   I have always been interested in programming but have no formal training other than some high school/college courses in languages like pascal, fortran etc.  About 3 years ago I taught myself Visual Basic for Applications, which was difficult for me to learn to say the least. I did ok once I gave up on trying to understand class objects.

I would love to be able to make small changes to large programs like Sylpheed to see if anything I do does anything other than crash the program.   Maybe somebody on this list offers some general tutoring for a fee or can point me in the right direction?