NAME

xmh − X window interface to the MH message handling system. 

SYNOPSIS

xmh [-path mailpath] [-initial foldername] [-flag] [-toolkitoption ...]

DESCRIPTION

The xmh program provides a window-oriented front end to the MH message handling system. It is designed to take advantage of a large graphical display and pointer; it will not function on an ordinary terminal at all. 
 
Xmh consists of user-interface code only.  To actually do things with your mail, it makes calls to the mh package. 
 
Please don’t be misled by the size of this document.  Xmh really is easy to use! 
 

INSTALLATION

The current version of xmh requires that the user is already set up to use mh, version 6.  To do so, see if there is a file called .mh_profile in your home directory.  If you do, check to see if it contains a line that starts with “Current-Folder”.  If it does, then you’ve been using version 4 or earlier of mh; to convert to version 6, you must remove that line.  (Failure to do so causes spurious output to stderr, which can hang xmh depending on your setup.) 
 
If you do not already have a .mh_profile, you can create one (and everything else you need) by typing “inc” to the shell.
 
For more information, refer to the mh (1) documentation. 
 

RUNNING XMH

Run xmh as you would any other X application (e.g., xterm).  It will accept a command-line display (of the form “-display host:dpy”); the default display is specified in the environment variable DISPLAY. 
 
The rest of this document will probably be rather hard to follow without actually running xmh and seeing the things being described. 
 

BASIC SCREEN LAYOUT

Xmh starts out with a single screen.  There will be 6 or 7 areas on the screen:
 

− A list of your folders.  (New users of mh will see only “inbox” here.) 

− A list of the global and folder-oriented commands. 

− A list of the messages in one of your folders (initially, this will show the messages in “inbox”). 

− A list of the message-oriented commands. 

− A view of one of your messages.  (Initially this is blank.) 

− A list of commands for the message being viewed. 

And, there will possibly be:

− A list of message-sequences defined for this folder.  This appears just below the list of messages in this folder.  (Message-sequences are discussed below; if you don’t know what they are, then you won’t have any.) 
 

XMH AND THE TOOLKIT

Xmh uses the X Toolkit.  Many of the features described below (scrollbars, buttonboxes, etc.) are actually part of the Toolkit, and are described here only for completeness.  For more information, see the Toolkit documentation. 
 

SCROLLBARS

Some parts of the screen will have a vertical area on the left containing a grey bar.  This area is a scrollbar.  They are used whenever the data in a window takes up more space than can be displayed.  The grey bar indicates what portion of your data is visible. Thus, if the entire length of the area is grey, then you are looking at all your data.  If only the first half is grey, then you are looking at the top half of your data. 
 
You can use the pointer in the scrollbar to change what part of the data is visible.  If you click with the middle button, then the top of the grey area will move to where the pointer is, and the corresponding portion of data will be displayed.  If you hold down the middle button, you can drag around the grey area.  This makes it easy to get to the top of the data: just press with the middle, drag off the top of the scrollbar, and release.
 
If you click with button 1, then the data to the right of the pointer will scroll to the top of the window.  If you click with pointer button 3, then the data at the top of the window will scroll down to where the pointer is.
 

BUTTONBOXES

Any area consisting of many words or short phrases, each enclosed in a box, is called a buttonbox.  Each box is actually a button that you can press by moving the pointer onto it and pressing pointer button 1.  If a given buttonbox has more buttons in it than can fit, it will be displayed with a scrollbar, so you can always scroll to the button you want. 
 

ADJUSTING THE RELATIVE SIZES OF AREAS ON THE SCREEN

If you’re not satisfied with the size of the various areas on the screen, they can easily be changed.  Near the right edge of the border between each region is a black box, called a grip.  Simply point to that grip with the pointer, press a pointer button, drag up or down, and release.  Exactly what happens depends on which pointer button you press. 
 
If you drag with the middle button, then only that border will move.  This mode is simplest to understand, but is probably the least useful.
 
If you drag with pointer button 1, then you are adjusting the size of the window above.  Xmh will attempt to compensate by adjusting some window below it. 
 
If you drag with pointer button 3, then you are adjusting the size of the window below.  Xmh will attempt to compensate by adjusting some window above it. 
 
All windows have a mininum and maximum size; you will never be allowed to move a border past the point where it would make a window have an invalid size.
 

SELECTED FOLDER

The selected folder is whichever foldername is highlighted in the top buttonbox.  Note that this is not necessarily the same folder that is being viewed.  To change the selected folder, just press on the desired folder button. 
 

GENERAL COMMANDS AND FOLDER COMMANDS

The second buttonbox contains commands of a global nature:
 

Quit XMH
Exits xmh, after first checking that you won’t lose any changes. 

Compose Message
Composes a new message.  A new window will be brought up; for a description of it, see COMPOSITION WINDOWS, below.

Open Folder
Display the data in the selected folder.  Thus, the selected folder also becomes the viewed folder.

Open Folder in New Window
Creates a new screen, and displays the selected folder in that screen. Note, however, that you may not display the same folder in more than one screen at a time.

Create Folder
Create a new folder.  You will be prompted for a name for the new folder; to enter the name, point the pointer at the blank box provided and type. Hit the Confirm button when finished, or hit Abort to cancel this operation.

Delete Folder
Destroy the selected folder.  You will be asked to confirm this action (see CONFIRMATION WINDOWS).
 

HIGHLIGHTED MESSAGES, SELECTED MESSAGES

AND THE CURRENT MESSAGE

It is possible to highlight a set of messages in the list of messages for the viewed folder.  To highlight a message, just click on it with pointer button 1.  To highlight a range of messages, click on the first one with pointer button 1 and on the last one with pointer button 3. 
 
The selected messages are the same as the highlighted messages, if any.  If no messages are highlighted, then the selected messages are considered the same as the current message.
 
The current message is indicated by a ’+’ next to the message number.  It usually corresponds to the message currently being viewed.
 

MESSAGE COMMANDS

The third buttonbox (fourth if you have message-sequences displayed) contains commands to deal with messages:
 

Incorporate New Mail
Add any new mail received to your inbox folder, and set the current message to be the first new message.  (This button is selectable only if “inbox” is the folder being viewed.)

View Next Message
View the first selected message.  If no messages are highlighted, view the current message.  If current message is already being viewed, view the first unmarked message after the current message.

View Previous Message
View the last selected message.  If no messages are highlighted, view the current message.  If current message is already being viewed, view the first unmarked message before the current message.

Mark Deleted
Mark the selected messages for deletion.  If no messages are highlighted, then this will automatically display the next unmarked message.

Mark Move
Mark the selected messages to be moved into the current folder.  (If the current folder is the same as the viewed folder, this command will just beep.)  If no messages are highlighted, then this will automatically display the next unmarked message.

Mark Copy
Mark the selected messages to be copied into the current folder.  (If the current folder is the same as the viewed folder, this command will just beep.)

Unmark
Remove any of the above three marks from the selected messages.

View in New Window
Create a new window containing only a view of the first selected message.

Reply Create a composition window in reply to the first selected message. 

Forward
Create a composition window whose body is initialized to be the contents of the selected messages.

Use as Composition
Create a composition window whose body is initialized to be this message. Note that any changes you make in the composition will also be saved in this message.  This function is meant to be used with the “drafts” folder (see COMPOSITION WINDOWS).

Commit Changes
Execute any deletions, moves, and copies that have been marked in this folder.

Print Print the selected messages.  Xmh normally prints by invoking the enscript(1) command, but you may change the command it uses.  (See CUSTOMIZING, below). 

Pack folder
Renumber the messages in this folder so they start with 1 and increment by 1.

Sort folder
Sort the messages in this folder in chronological order.  As a side effect, this also packs the folder.

Force Rescan
Rebuild the list of messages.  This can be used whenever you suspect xmh’s idea of what messages you have is wrong.  (In particular, this is useful if you ever change things using straight mh commands without using xmh.) 

Pick Messages
Define a new message-sequence.  (See MESSAGE-SEQUENCES.)

The following buttons will appear but will be sensitive only if the current folder has any message-sequences defined (See MESSAGE-SEQUENCES). 

Open Sequence
Change the viewed sequence to be the same as the selected sequence.

Add to Sequence
Add the selected messages to the selected sequence.

Remove from Sequence
Remove the selected messages from the selected sequence.

Delete Sequence
Remove the selected sequence entirely.  Note the messages themselves are not affected; they simply are no longer grouped together as a message-sequence.
 

VIEW WINDOWS

The commands in these windows are the same as the message commands by the same name, except instead of affecting the selected messages, they affect the viewed message.  In addition there is the “Edit View” button, which allows you to edit the message being viewed.  While editing, the “Edit View” button will change to a “Save View” button, which should be pressed to save your edits. 
 

COMPOSITION WINDOWS

Aside from the normal text editing functions, there are six command buttons associated with composition windows:

Close Close this composition window.  If changes have been made since the most recent Save or Send, you will be asked to confirm losing them. 

Send Send this composition. 

Reset Replace the current composition with an empty message.  If changes have been made since the most recent Send or Save, you will be asked to confirm losing them. 

Compose
Bring up another new composition window.

Save Save this composition in your drafts folder.  (If you do not have a folder named “drafts”, one will be created.)  Then you can safely close the composition.  At some future date, you can continue working on the composition by opening your drafts folder, selecting the message, and using the “Use as Composition” command. 

Insert Insert a related message into the composition.  If the composition window was created with a Reply button, the related message is the message being replied to, otherwise no related message is defined and this button is inactive.  The message will be filtered before being inserted; see ReplyInsertFilter under CUSTOMIZING below. 

TEXT EDITING COMMANDS

All of the text editing commands are actually defined by the Text widget in the X Toolkit.  The commands may be bound to different keys than the defaults described below through the standard X Toolkit key re-binding mechanisms.  See the X Toolkit and Athena Widgets documentation for more details. 
 
Whenever you are asked to enter any text, you will be using a standard text editing interface.  Various control and meta keystroke combinations are bound to a somewhat Emacs-like set of commands.  In addition, the pointer buttons may be used to select a portion of text or to move the insertion point in the text. Pressing pointer button 1 causes the insertion point to move to the pointer.  Double-clicking button 1 selects a word, triple-clicking selects a paragraph, and quadruple-clicking selects everything.  Any selection may be extended in either direction by using pointer button 3.
 
In the following, a line refers to one displayed row of characters in the window.  A paragraph refers to the text between carriage returns.  Text within a paragraph is broken into lines based on the current width of the window. 
 
The following keystroke combinations are defined:

Control-A
Move to the beginning of the current line.

Control-B, Control-H, Backspace
Move backward one character.

Control-D
Delete the next character.

Control-E
Move to the end of the current line.

Control-F
Move forward one character.

Control-J, LineFeed
Create a new paragraph with the same indentation as the previous one.

Control-K
Kill the rest of this line.

Control-L
Refresh.  Repaint this window.

Control-M, Return
New paragraph.

Control-N
Move down to the next line.

Control-O
Break this paragraph into two.

Control-P
Move up to the previous line.

Control-V
Move down to the next screen-full of text.

Control-W
Kill the selected text.

Control-Y
Insert the last killed text.

Control-Z
Scroll the text one line up.

Meta-< Move to the beginning of the document. 

Meta-> Move to the end of the document. 

Meta-[ Move backward one paragraph. 

Meta-] Move forward one paragraph. 

Meta-B Move backward one word. 

Meta-D Kill the next word. 

Meta-F Move forward one word. 

Meta-H, Meta-Delete
Kill the previous word.

Meta-I Insert a file.  If any text is selected, use the selected text as the filename.  Otherwise, a box will appear in which you can type the desired filename. 

Meta-V Move up to the previous screen-full of text. 

Meta-Y Stuff the last selected text here.  Note that this can be text selected in some other text subwindow.  Also, if you select some text in an xterm window, it may be inserted in an xmh window with this command.  Pressing pointer button 2 is equivalent to this. 

Meta-Z Scroll the text one line down. 

Delete Delete the previous character. 
 

CONFIRMATION WINDOWS

Whenever you press a button that may cause you to lose some work or is otherwise dangerous, a window will appear asking you to confirm the action.  This window will contain an “Abort” or “No”button and a “Confirm” or “Yes” button.  Pressing the “Abort” button cancels the operation, and pressing the “Confirm” will proceed with the operation.  (A very handy shortcut exists: if you press the original, offending button again, it will be interpreted as a “Confirm”.  If you press any other command button, it will be interpreted as an “Abort”.) 
 

MESSAGE-SEQUENCES

A mh message sequence is just a set of messages associated with some name.  They are local to a particular folder; two different folders can have sequences with the same name.  In all folders, the sequence “all” is predefined; it consists of the set of all messages in that folder.  (The sequence “cur” is also usually defined for every folder; it consists of only the current message.  Xmh hides “cur” from the user, instead placing a “+” by the current message.  Also, xmh does not support the “unseen” sequence, so that one is also hidden from the user.) 
 
The message sequences for a folder are displayed as buttons containing the names of the sequences (including one for “all”).  The table of contents (aka “toc”) is at any one time displaying one message sequence.  This is called the “viewed sequence”; if it’s not “all”, its name will be displayed in the title bar just after the folder name.  Also, at any time one of the sequence buttons will be highlighted.  This is called the “selected sequence”.  Note that the viewed sequence and the selected sequence are not necessarily the same.  (This all pretty much corresponds to the way the folder buttons work.)
 
The Open Sequence, Add to Sequence, Remove from Sequence, and Delete Sequence buttons are active only if the viewed folder contains message-sequences. 

Note that none of the above actually effect whether a message is in the folder.  Remember that a sequence is a set of messages within the folder; the above operations just affect what messages are in that set. 
 
To create a new sequence, press the “Pick” button.  A new window will appear, with lots of places to enter text. Basically, you can describe the sequence’s initial set of messages based on characteristics of the message.  Thus, you can define a sequence to be all the messages that were from a particular person, or with a particular subject, and so on.  You can also connect things up with boolean operators, so you can select all things from “weissman” with the subject “xmh”.
 
Hopefully, the layout is fairly obvious.  The simplest cases are the easiest: just point to the proper field and type.  If you enter in more than one field, it will only select messages which match all non-empty fields.
 
The more complicated cases arise when you want things that match one field or another one, but not necessarily both.  That’s what all the “or” buttons are for.  If you want all things with the subject “xmh” or “xterm”, just press the “or” button next to the “Subject:” field. Another box will appear where you can enter another subject.
 
If you want all things either from “weissman” or with subject “xmh”, but not necessarily both, select the “-Or-” button.  This will essentially double the size of the form.  You can then enter “weissman” in a from: box on the top half, and “xmh” in a subject: box on the lower part.
 
If you ever select the “Skip” button, then only those messages that don’t match the fields on that row are included. 
 
Finally, in the bottom part of the window will appear several more boxes. One is the name of the sequence you’re defining.  (It defaults to the name of the selected sequence when “Pick” was pressed, or to “temp” if “all” was the selected sequence.)  Another box defines which sequence to look through for potential members of this sequence; it defaults to the viewed sequence when “Pick” was pressed.
 
Two more boxes define a date range; only messages within that date range will be considered.  These dates must be entered in 822-style format: each date is of the form “dd mmm yy hh:mm:ss zzz”, where dd is a one or two digit day of the month, mmm is the three-letter abbreviation for a month, and yy is a year.  The remaining fields are optional: hh, mm, and ss specify a time of day, and zzz selects a time zone.  Note that if the time is left out, it defaults to midnight; thus if you select a range of “7 nov 86” - “8 nov 86”, you will only get messages from the 7th, as all messages on the 8th will have arrived after midnight.
 
“Date field” specifies which date field in the header to look at for this date range; it probably won’t be useful to anyone.  If the sequence you’re defining already exists, you can optionally merge the old set with the new; that’s what the “Yes” and “No” buttons are all about. Finally, you can “OK” the whole thing, or “Cancel” it.
 
In general, most people will rarely use these features.  However, it’s nice to occasionally use “Pick” to find some messages, look through them, and then hit “Delete Sequence” to put things back in their original state.
 

CUSTOMIZING XMH

As with all standard X applications, xmh may be customized through entries in the resource manager.  The following resource manager entries are defined: [Note: the entry names must be entered in either all lower-case, or in the exact case shown below.]

BackGround
Background color.  Currently, this will effect only buttons.  (Default is white.)

ButtonFont
What font to use for button names.  (Default is “timrom10”.)

CheckNewMail
If True, xmh will check at regular intervals to see if new mail has arrived for any of the folders.  A visual indication will be given if new mail is waiting to be retrieved.  (Default is True.) 

CompButtonLines
How many rows of buttons to display under a composition.  (Default is 1.)

CompFont
What font to use when composing a message.  (Default is “6x13”.)

CompGeometry
Initial geometry for windows containing compositions.

CompLines
How many lines of a composition to display.  (Default is 20.)

ConfirmFont
What font to use for confirmation windows. (Default is “timrom10b”.)

FolderButtonLines
How many rows of folder command buttons to display.  (Default is 1.)

FolderLines
How many rows of foldername buttons to display.  (Default is 1.)

ForeGround
Foreground color.  Currently, this will effect only title bars and buttons.  (Default is black.)

Geometry
Default geometry to use.  (Default is none.)

HideBoringHeaders
If “on”, then xmh will attempt to skip uninteresting header lines within messages by scrolling them off.  (Default is “on”.) 

InitialFolder
Which folder to display on startup.  May also be set with the command-line option -initial.  (Default is “inbox”.) 

InitialIncFile
The file name of your incoming mail drop.  xmh tries to construct a filename for the “inc -file” command, but in some installations (e.g. those using the Post Office Protocol) no file is appropriate.  In this case, InitialIncFile should be specified as the empty string, and inc will be invoked without a -file argument. 

LabelFont
What font to use for the title bars. (Default is “timrom10i”.)

MailPath
The full path prefix for locating your mail folders.  May also be set with the command-line option, -path. (Default is the “Path” component in $HOME/.mh_profile, or “$HOME/Mail” if none.) 

MailWaitingFlag
If True, xmh will attempt to set an indication in it’s icon when new mail is waiting to be retrieved.  If this option is True, then CheckNewMail is assumed to be True as well.  The -flag command line option is a quick way to turn MailWaitingFlag on. 

MhPath
What directory in which to find the mh commands.  If a command isn’t found here, then the directories in the user’s path are searched.  (Default is “/usr/local/mh6”.)

PickGeometry
Initial geometry for pick windows.

PickEntryFont
What font to use for user text fields in pick windows.  (Default is “timrom10”.)

PickTextFont
What font to use for static text fields in pick windows.  (Default is “timrom10”.)

PrintCommand
What sh command to execute to print a message.  Note that stdout and stderr must be specifically redirected!  If a message or range of messages is selected for printing, the full file paths of each message file is appended to the specified print command.   (Default is “enscript >/dev/null 2>/dev/null”).

ReplyInsertFilter
A shell command to be executed when the Insert button is activated in a composition window.  The full path and filename of the source message is added to the end of the command before being passed to sh(1).  The default filter is echo; i.e. it merely inserts the name of the file into the composition.  Other interesting filters are awk -e ’{print "    " $0}’ or /usr/new/mh.6.5/lib/mhl -form mhl.body. 

TempDir
Directory for xmh to store temporary directories.  For privacy, a user might want to change this to a private directory.  (Default is “/tmp”.) 

TocButtonLines
How many rows of message command buttons to display.  (Default is 1.)

TocFont
What font to use for a folder’s table of contents.  (Default is “6x13”.)

TocGeometry
Initial geometry for master xmh windows. 

TocLines
How many messages to display in a folder’s table of contents.  (Default is 10.)

TocWidth
How many characters to generate for each message in a folder’s table of contents.  (Default is 100.  Use 80 if you plan to use mhl a lot.) 

ViewButtonLines
How many rows of buttons to display under a view of a message.  (Default is 1.)

ViewFont
What font to use for a view of a message.  (Default is “6x13”.)

ViewGeometry
Initial geometry for windows showing only a view of a message.

ViewLines
How many lines of a message to display.  (Default is 20.)

If TocGeometry, ViewGeometry, CompGeometry, or PickGeometry are not specified, then the value of Geometry is used instead.  If the resulting height is not specified (e.g., "", "=500", "+0-0"), then the default height is calculated from the fonts and line counts specified above.  If the width is not specified (e.g., "", "=x300", "-0+0), then half of the display width is used.  If unspecified, the height of a pick window defaults to half the height of the display. 
 
Any of these options may also be specified on the command line by using the standard X Toolkit resource specification mechanism. Thus, to run xmh showing all message headers,
 
% xmh -xrm ’∗HideBoringHeaders:off’
 

The initial text displayed in a composition window is generated by executing the corresponding mh command; i.e. comp, repl, or forw and therefore message components may be customized as specified for those commands.  Comp is executed only once per invocation of xmh and the message template is re-used for each successive new composition. 
 

FILES

~/Mail
 
~/.mh_profile
 

SEE ALSO

X(1), xrdb(1), X Toolkit, mh(1) - the mh Message Handler
 

BUGS

Printing support is minimal. 
 
Keyboard shortcuts for commands would be nice.
 
Should handle the “unseen” message-sequence.
 
Should determine by itself if the user hasn’t used mh before, and offer to set things up for him or her. 
 
Still a few commands missing (rename folder, remail message).
 
Needs sub-folder support.
 

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 1988, Digital Equipment Corporation. 
See X(1) for a full statement of rights and permissions. 

AUTHOR

Terry Weissman, Digital Western Research Laboratory
 

NEWS-OSRelease 3.3