NAME

prompter − prompting editor front-end

SYNTAX

prompter [−ddif] [−erase chr] [−kill chr] [−prepend | −noprepend] [−rapid | −norapid] file [−help]

DESCRIPTION

The prompter editor is a rudimentary editor provided by comp, dist, forw, or repl. You do not need to specify this editor. It is automatically called by the above commands.  You can change this editor to an editor of your choice, by inserting the following line in your .mh_profile file.

editor:editorname

Any ULTRIX editor can be specified in your .mh_profile.

You can also specify an alternative editor each time that you use comp, dist, forw, or repl, by using the −editor editorname option.   This is useful if you have special requirements for a message. You can use an editor other than the one you normally use.  The following example shows how you can compose a message using vi as the editor:

$ comp −editor vi

The prompter editor allows rapid composition of messages. It is particularly useful to network and low-speed (less than 2400 baud) users of MH. The prompter editor is an MH program.  It can have its own profile entry with switches, but it is not invoked directly. The commands comp, dist, forw, and repl invoke prompter as an editor, either when invoked with −editor prompter, or by the profile entry Editor: prompter, or when given the command edit prompter when prompted with What now?. 

For each empty component prompter finds in the draft, you are prompted for a response; a <RETURN> will cause the whole component to be left out. Otherwise, a back-slash (\) preceding a <RETURN> will continue the response on the next line, allowing for multiline components. Continuation lines must begin with a space or tab.

Each non-empty component is copied to the draft and displayed on the terminal. 

The start of the message body is indicated by a blank line or a line of dashes.  If the body is non-empty, the prompt, which is not written to the file, is

    --------Enter additional text

or (if −prepend was given)

    --------Enter initial text

Typing of the message body is terminated with an end−of−file (usually CTRL−D).  At this point control is returned to the calling program, where you are asked What now?.  See whatnow() for the valid options to this query.

An interrupt (usually CTRL-C) during component typing will abort prompter and the MH command that invoked it. An interrupt during message-body typing is equivalent to CTRL-D, for historical reasons. This means that prompter should finish up and exit.

The prompter editor uses stdio(,), therefore do not edit files with nulls in them.

OPTIONS

−ddifPrepare a DDIF document for mailing. The −ddif option will accept specification of either a DDIF(5) or DOTS(5) file.  If the DDIF(5) file contains external references to other files, these are packed together in a single DOTS(5) encoding as a part of the preparations for packaging the document for mailing. 

−prependAdds text to the beginning of the message body and have the rest of the body follow.  This is useful for the forw command.

−rapidCauses the text to not be displayed on your terminal if the draft already contains text in the message-body, This is useful for low-speed terminals. 

−erase charSpecifies the line-editing characters where chr may be a character or \nnn, where nnn is the octal value for the character.

−kill charSpecifies the line-editing characters where chr may be a character or \nnn, where nnn is the octal value for the character.

The first non-flag argument to prompter is taken as the name of the draft file, and subsequent non-flag arguments are ignored.  Repl invokes editors with two file arguments:

The default settings for prompter are: −prepend and −norapid

EXAMPLE

The following is an example using the -ddif switch, plus send draft:

% prompter -ddif; send draft
To: <address>
cc: <other recipients>
Subject: <title of the message>
DDIF/DOTS file : <name of the DDIF or DOTS file>

FILES

PROFILE COMPONENTS

SEE ALSO

capsar(1), comp(1mh), dist(1mh), forw(1mh), repl(1mh), whatnow(1mh), stdio(3s), DDIF(5), DOTS(5), mh_profile(5mh)

Commands