[6] in Software_Announce
exmh 1.2delta in tcl locker
shabby@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (shabby@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri Jan 14 15:59:59 1994
I've installed a new version of exmh in the tcl locker. It should
work much better, according to the author. Exmh is an alternative to
xmh, that I find extremely user-friendly. Bugs in the MIT exmh
installation go to bug-sipb@mit.edu. Thanks...
There's apparently xface support in exmh but I don't know if anyone
has xfaces installed anywhere. If it is, please send mail to me,
shabby@mit.edu. Thanks.
Here follows a list of features above and beyond the usual layer on
top of MH commands provided by exmh:
MIME support! Displays richtext and enriched directly. Parses
multipart messages. Displays hot buttons that invoke external viewers
(metamail) for things not directly supported. Built-in editor allows
simple composition of text/enriched format.
Color feedback in the scan listing so you can easily identify
unseen messages (blue), the current message (red), deleted
messages (gray background), and moved messages (yellow background).
Xresources control these color choices.
Monochrome displays highlight unseen messages with underline,
current message in reverse video, deleted messages with cross-hatching
background, and moved messages with stippled background.
A folder display with one label per folder. Color highlights
indicate the current folder (red), folders with unseen messages
in them (blue), and the target folder for moves (yellow background).
Nested folders are highlighted by a shadow box. A cache of
recently visted folder buttons is also maintained. Monochrome
highlights are reverse video for the current folder, bold box
for folders with unseen messages, and stippled box for the
target of move operations.
Clever scan caching. MH users know that scan is slow, so
exmh tries hard to cache the current state of the folder to
avoid scanning. Moves and deletes within exmh do not
invalidate the cache, and background incs that add new messages
are handled by merging them into the scan listing. The
scan cache is compatible with xmh.
Facesaver bitmap display. If you have a facesaver database
on your system, exmh displays the bitmap face of the person
that sent the current message (or their organization).
Otherwise, it just displays a boring EXMH logo.
Background inc. You can set exmh to run inc periodically,
or just to periodically count up the messages in your mail spool file.
(Depends on proper TK send functioning. See notes below.)
% Note: this is not working currently... When I do my next build of
% tk, I'll get it working right. (the "Depends on proper TK send
% functioning" thing...)
Various inc styles. Exmh knows about three styles of inc usage:
Inc from your spool file to your inbox folder.
Inc from your spool file or POP host to a set of dropboxes as specified
by your ~/.xmhcheck file.
Inc from your spool file directly into folders. Exmh can run the MH
filtering program (slocal) for you, or you can let an external agent
presort mail into folders for you.
Searching over folder listing and message body.
A dialog-box interface to MH pick.
A simple editor with emacs-like bindings is provided by default.
It has an interface that lets you tweak key bindings.
% the built-in editor doesn't support arrow keys yet... I'll look into
% adding them to the default bindings this weekend.
Editor interface. You can hook up exmh to TCL based-editors
like mxedit quite easily. A script is also provided, exmh-async,
for using terminal based editors like vi. The emacsclient.README
file has hand-wavy instructions for using emacsclient to talk
to an emacs server.
% the emacsclient.README file is in /mit/tcl/src/exmh-1.2/misc
User preferences. You can tune exmh through a dialog box. The settings
are saved in an Xresource-style file named .exmh-defaults. You can
also put font and color resource specifications in this file, plus
there are a few random parameters not exposed via preferences.
User hacking support. A user library of TCL routines is supported.
The main implementation is chopped up into many smallish modules.
So, you can modify a copy of some module to put your favorite mail
reader hack in without affecting others (or convincing me to put
it into the main line). There are also a number of places where
hook procedures are used so you can refine the behavior of things
like composing a reply message. Details in the man page.
