The `mh' Mode
The
mh mode of
jedit is intended for composing email with MH.
This document describes the
exmh mode available with version 4.1/4.4 of
jedit.
If you only use MH on X workstations, and you always want to use
jedit for composing MH mail messages, you can put
repl: -ed jedit -mode mh
forw: -ed jedit -mode mh
comp: -ed jedit -mode mh
in your
~/.mh_profile. (You may be able to leave off the `-mode mh' parts, since
jedit will usually guess correctly that you're editing an MH draft,
based on the pathname.)
However, this will break using MH when you don't have an X display
available, unless you override it with an explicit commandline
flag. I actually use a little shell script I call
generic-editor, whose contents are the following
#!/bin/sh
# generic-editor - start up an appropriate editor
if [ ${DISPLAY:-NONE} = "NONE" ]
then
exec /usr/local/bin/emacs "$@"
else
exec /usr/local/bin/jedit "$@"
fi
and I set my
EDITOR environment variable to that. (Obviously, this could be
made more elaborate; for instance, at one time I had it checking
whether I was running under NextStep, too.)
The
mh mode provides a modespecific `MH' menu and buttonbar. The
buttonbar duplicates the commands on the menu (with terser names);
what I say here about the menu commands also applies to the buttons.
Start Reply
The `Start Reply' command inserts the contents of the file
@ in the current directory at the end of the message. (By
MH convention, this should contain the message you're replying
to.) The header is stripped from the file, and it's indented
to indicate it's a reply. (See
Bugs and Misfeatures.)
Sign Email
The `Sign Email' command inserts the contents of your
~/.signature file at the bottom of your mail. (The signature is automatically
inserted in a fixedpitch font, in case you normally use a proportional
font and you have ASCII graphics in your
.signature, not that I recommend that practise. :-)
List Recipients
The `List Recipients' command saves your message and runs the
MH
whom(1) command on it, displaying the output. This can sometimes
be useful in identifying typos in email addresses.
Insert Border
The `Insert Border' command inserts a row of spaced asterisks
into your message. I sometimes use this when forwarding mail
or copying snippets of files or a screen dump into mail.
Done
The `Done' command from the `Editor' menu is duplicated on the
buttonbar for convenience, and on the `MH' menu for consistency.
Hitting the
Tab key while typing in your message takes you the first header
field, whose contents are selected. Hitting
Tab again (not too quickly!) will cycle through the header fields.
If you have `Typing replaces selection' chosen on the
jstools
Global Preferences panel, this lets you easily fill in the header fields of your
message.
Hitting
Tab twice quickly, or hitting it when the last header field is
selected, takes you directly to the end of your text.
By default, the
mh mode displays breaks in long lines at character boundaries
rather than just at word boundaries; this makes it a little
easier to see if you have a line that's too long for email (assuming
your window itself isn't too wide). Also,
mh mode will automatically insert newlines for you as you approach
the right margin. (There are two different concepts here -
whether
real newlines are inserted, creating a new line even if you didn't
hit the
Return key, and how long lines are
displayed on the screen. When you're composing email, it's a good
idea not to let your lines get any longer than about 72 characters.)
Of course, you can change these preferences on
jedit's
ModeSpecific Preferences panel.
The `exmh' Mode
The `mail' Mode
* Hardcoding
Tab to jump to the header fields makes it hard to use dynamic abbreviations
(or tabs, for that matter!).
* My quirky indentation style for quoting text should not be hardwired
into
mh mode! This (and possibly the use of
Tab to jump to the headers) should be a user preference; that
would require changes to
jedit's mode and preferencehandling mechanisms.
Future Directions
* I hope to add creeping features.
* I'd like to add MIME support, either based on Brent's code in
mh's builtin editor, or based on similar code to that in
jtagconvert.tcl.
* I'd like to put the headers on their own panel, separate from
the body of the message. Of course, I'd want to do this in
a sufficiently general way not to prevent people from adding headers
like `Precedence:', `X-Face:', or `X-Opcode-of-the-Week:' if they choose.