NAME

prompter − prompting editor front-end

SYNTAX

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

DESCRIPTION

prompter 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 particularly useful if you have special requirements for a message that mean you need to use a different editor from the one you use normally.  The following example shows how you can compose a message using vi as the editor:

$ comp −editor vi

prompter is an editor which allows rapid composition of messages. It is particularly useful to network and low-speed (less than 2400 baud) users of MH. It is an MH program in that it can have its own profile entry with switches, but it is not invoked directly by you. 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 denoted 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.

OPTIONS

By using the −prepend switch, you can add some text to the beginning of the message body and have the rest of the body follow. This is useful for the forw command.

By using the −rapid switch, if the draft already contains text in the message-body, the text is not displayed on your terminal. This is useful for low-speed terminals.

You can specify the line-editing characters for −kill and −erase with the arguments −kill chr and −erase  chr, where chr may be a character; or \nnn, where nnn is the octal value for the character.

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 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
−norapid

prompter uses stdio(,), so do not edit files with nulls in them.

FILES

PROFILE COMPONENTS

SEE ALSO

comp(1mh), dist(1mh), forw(1mh), repl(1mh), whatnow(1mh), stdio(3s), mh-profile(5mh)