The mh mode of jedit is intended for composing email with MH.
This document describes the exmh mode available with version 4.0/4.0b of jedit.
If you only use MH on X workstations, and you always want to use jedit for composing MH mail messages, you can put
repl: -ed jedit -mode mh
forw: -ed jedit -mode mh
comp: -ed jedit -mode mh
However, this will break using MH when you don't have an X display available, unless you override it with an explicit commandline flag. I actually use a little shell script I call generic-editor, whose contents are the following
#!/bin/sh
# generic-editor - start up an appropriate editor
if [ ${DISPLAY:-NONE} = "NONE" ]
then
exec /usr/local/bin/emacs "$@"
else
exec /usr/local/bin/jedit "$@"
fi
The mh mode provides a modespecific `MH' menu and buttonbar. The buttonbar duplicates the commands on the menu (with terser names); what I say here about the menu commands also applies to the buttons.
The `Start Reply' command inserts the contents of the file @ in the current directory at the end of the message. (By MH convention, this should contain the message you're replying to.) The header is stripped from the file, and it's indented to indicate it's a reply. (See Bugs and Misfeatures.)
The `Sign Email' command inserts the contents of your ~/.signature file at the bottom of your mail. (The signature is automatically inserted in a fixedpitch font, in case you normally use a proportional font and you have ASCII graphics in your .signature, not that I recommend that practise. :-)
The `List Recipients' command saves your message and runs the MH whom(1) command on it, displaying the output. This can sometimes be useful in identifying typos in email addresses.
The `Insert Border' command inserts a row of spaced asterisks into your message. I sometimes use this when forwarding mail or copying snippets of files or a screen dump into mail.
The `Done' command from the `Editor' menu is duplicated on the buttonbar for convenience, and on the `MH' menu for consistency.
Hitting the Tab key while typing in your message takes you the first header field, whose contents are selected. Hitting Tab again (not too quickly!) will cycle through the header fields. If you have `Typing replaces selection' chosen on the jstools Global Preferences panel, this lets you easily fill in the header fields of your message.
Hitting Tab twice quickly, or hitting it when the last header field is selected, takes you directly to the end of your text.
By default, the mh mode displays breaks in long lines at character boundaries rather than just at word boundaries; this makes it a little easier to see if you have a line that's too long for email (assuming your window itself isn't too wide). Also, mh mode will automatically insert newlines for you as you approach the right margin. (There are two different concepts here - whether real newlines are inserted, creating a new line even if you didn't hit the Return key, and how long lines are displayed on the screen. When you're composing email, it's a good idea not to let your lines get any longer than about 72 characters.)
Of course, you can change these preferences on jedit's ModeSpecific Preferences panel.
* Hardcoding Tab to jump to the header fields makes it hard to use dynamic abbreviations (or tabs, for that matter!).
* My quirky indentation style for quoting text should not be hardwired into mh mode! This (and possibly the use of Tab to jump to the headers) should be a user preference; that would require changes to jedit's mode and preferencehandling mechanisms.
* I hope to add creeping features.
* I'd like to add MIME support, either based on Brent's code in mh's builtin editor, or based on similar code to that in jtagconvert.tcl.
* I'd like to put the headers on their own panel, separate from the body of the message. Of course, I'd want to do this in a sufficiently general way not to prevent people from adding headers like `Precedence:', `X-Face:', or `X-Opcode-of-the-Week:' if they choose.