On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 11:02:49 -0400 Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> sez:
As a user who _barely_ uses more than the basic features of NMH,
I was completely unaware of all this. (That is my fault, of
course. B-) The SYNOPSIS section does not show that "-use"
optionally takes an argument.
Well, so, here's the thing ... -use doesn't actually take an optional
argument.
If you look at the SYNOPSIS, the beginning is:
comp [-help] [-version] [+folder] [msg] ...
So when you say "comp -use 1", you're setting the -use flag, and "1"
is the optional "msg" argument.
I _thought_ that that might be the case, but was confused when
(due to the -use flag) providing the "msg" argument wasn't
generating a new draft based on that message. I'm guessing that
the effect of the -use flag overrides any conflicting behavior
from supplying a message argument.
Maybe add a (possibly
parenthetical) sentence to the end of the current -use
explanation paragraph -- e.g.
The switch -use directs comp to continue editing an
already started message. That is, if a comp (or dist,
repl, or forw) is terminated without sending the draft,
the draft can be edited again via “comp -useâ€. Note:
consult also the mh-draft(5) man page if using the draft
folder facility.
Ooof, Bob ... can we talk? Your message was sent out using the
character set iso8859-1, but the bytes you sent in the above paragraph
were UTF-8. Which makes me think that your local character set is UTF-8
but for some reason you have configured nmh to only use ISO8859-1,
which is just a recipie for problems in the long run. It looks like
those were supposed to be left & right double quotation marks
(U+201C & U+201D).
Oops! Sorry about that! Yes, I forgot to change the outgoing
message's character set to UTF-8 (from my default iso-8859-1).
And you're correct, Ken, that my system (Ubuntu 18.04) is set up
for UTF-8:
$ echo $XTERM_LOCALE
en_US.UTF-8
And sigh, the handling around the draft file vs a draft folder
is a confusing mess. In a perfect world I'd just switch
everything to draft folders and toss draft file handling in the
trash can.
I can see how that might make things more uniform. B-) I'd need
to change my muscle memory, but I wouldn't mind.
On that note, and for folks and Norms curious about -use, lack of
Draft-folder, etc., I provide the following anec-data.
So, I was kind of in the same boat, except ... as a long-time exmh users,
I was forced to use a Draft-folder entry a few decades ago so I am used
to the draft-folder behavior.
Every (long) once in a while, you guys change the behavior of NMH
in a way that forces me to update my procedures -- almost always
correcting something based on a misunderstanding. B-) And, to
be very clear, I'm very grateful that you're still doing that!
I'll adapt. B-)
As far as I can tell, comp(1) is just verifying that the message
exists. It doesn't use it to construct a new reply (and thus
overwrite what's already in ~/Mail/draft), or change the current
message. In particular, if the number or list doesn't exist,
comp will complain about it:
[...]
_Huh_. Boy, talk about a confusing mess. I wouldn't have expected
that from reading the code. So ... I guess this is happening in
m_draft(). Maybe? Ugh.
This is SO confusing. Again, the weird handling of the special "draft"
file is such a mess; if it was just a regular nmh folder/message it would
be much simpler.
I know this would be a (very low) priority fix, but I would not
object to it. (I'm also fine with it the way it is. B-)
Bob