[comp.mail.mh] news

trost@reed.UUCP (Bill Trost) (10/28/87)

I've played around with using mh to read news, and I've found the
interface severly lacking when compared with something like rn.  The
only way to go about it is to read each article as it comes, no saving
articles and no deleting by subject.

My point is, has anyone gotten around these problems?  Is there
something significant I'm missing?  I've started working on hacking
the code for show to provide a way to provide a reasonable way for
seeing the "next", "prev", "first", and "last" desired articles in a
newsgroup, but I'd rather not go through the mess of dredging code out
of mh if I don't need to.
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scott@tekcrl.TEK.COM (Scott Huddleston) (10/28/87)

In article <7567@reed.UUCP> tekcrl!tektronix!reed!trost trost@reed.UUCP (Bill Trost) writes:
>I've played around with using mh to read news, and I've found the
>interface severly lacking when compared with something like rn.  ...
>...  Is there (some way to see) ...
>... the "next", "prev", "first", and "last" desired articles in a
>newsgroup ...

Yes, by an awful hack (in versions 5.x).  MH stores sequences
for read-only folders (like newsgroups) in ".context" in your mail
directory.  It has a limit of about 12 such sequences, after which no
more can be created or used.  One "cur" sequence per newsgroup (from
which next/prev are derived) uses up the limit pretty fast.  If you
delete ".context" entries frequently (by manual editing) and don't read
many newsgroups, MH is almost a tolerable news reader.

An even worse flaw (in v. 5.13) is MH fails to recognized large-numbered
files as messages (somewhere between 3000 and 8000).  I believe both problems
have been fixed in later MH versions (write if you need pointers).

MH's "pick" command will let you select messages by subject/keyword/etc.  
"rmm" is futile in a read-only folder, but you can copy messages with
"refile".  Or if space is tight, make a manipulatible newsgroup image
by setting up soft links from a folder of yours to all messages in a
newsgroup folder.

If anyone has developed a good MH interface for news, I'd like to hear
about it.
-------------------------------
...!tektronix!tekcrl!scott
scott@crl.tek.com

mcg@omepd (Steven McGeady) (10/29/87)

----------

Mike Zuhl (omepd!radix!mikez) has a fairly nice screen-oriented MH
mail reader called 'mhedit'.  It uses a browser style of interface,
along with 'vi' commands to move you around the screen.  It displays
a message list that, at the top level, looks like the output from
'folders', allows you to select a folder, then displays a message
list which looks like the output from 'scan', allows you to select
a message and read it.  It lacks 'pick' capabilities from MH, and
'kill-file' capabilities from rn, but it might serve as a nice
conceptual model on which to build a usable interface.  I suggest
that you bug Mike to release it to the net.  He may or may not.


S. McGeady