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Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

2018-03-17 17:33:13


Ken Hornstein wrote:
... it turns out the default editor back in the day (if you didn't
configure one with mhconfig) was "prompter", which would give you a
kind of very simple message input interface (but not exactly like you
describe).

prompter is what i was thinking of. repl and forw also used it. it was great, because after i screwed something up and needed to get into an editor, i could say ^D and something would ask "What now?" and i'd give it some instruction that would _then_ start my visual editor of choice.

i say again: this was really, really nice. simplicity by default, and then all the power you asked for.

When did that change? That's ... not super clear. The default inside
of mhconfig.c has always been prompter, but somewhere between MH 5
and MH 6 the default configuration file had line added that sets the
editor to be /usr/bin/vi. But a lot of the example site templates
specify prompter, so what you GOT seems to depend on how things were
configured by whomever set up your MH installation. That suggests to
me that maybe the default editor (in absence of any environment
variables) should be prompter, actually

i think it should still be prompter, so that we have no editor assumption or dependency.

In nmh the fallback editor was always 'vi', from as far back as we
have revision history.

i probably felt this change only rarely, since by the time nmh came out, i was using mh primarily from within emacs, not command line.

--
P Vixie


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