[2370] in Athena Bugs
Help message in mh's "compose"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (stever@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Jun 11 13:32:43 1989
From: <stever@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 89 13:32:16 EDT
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Hi,
I was using compose to write a message to mar. I got to the
"What now?" prompt and typed "send." Send told me that the
message wasn't sent to any recipients (no explanation given.
Was it a badly formatted message header? A broken server
somewhere?)
It asked "What now?" again. I typed <CR> for help. It gave a
list of commands that looked like:
send [switches]
whom [switches]
... To me, a rather new user without a copy of the mh document,
that help message is close to useless. What are the legal
switches? What do those commands DO?
I couldn't get to a man page without losing my state [there's probably
some way I could have saved the message in a temporary file, but the
help message didn't give me enough information to figure out how to do
that], so I finally had to abort and retype the message from scratch.
Feature request: improve comp's help message to include a oneliner
describing what each command does and what legal switches are.
Ambitiuos feature request: add a "help" command so I can type "help send"
and get detailed information on the "send" option. This would be to
supplement, not replace, the one-liners.
-- Stephen
