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prompter(1) General Commands Manual prompter(1) NAME prompter - prompting editor front-end (only available within the mes- sage handling system, mh) SYNOPSIS prompter [ options ] file DESCRIPTION The prompter editor is a rudimentary editor provided by comp, dist, forw, and repl. It is automatically called by the above commands; you do not need to specify it. The prompter editor allows rapid composition of messages. It is par- ticularly useful to network and low-speed (less than 2400 baud) users of MH. The prompter editor is an MH program. Although is not invoked di- rectly, it can have its own profile entry with options; see mh_pro- file(4). The comp, dist, forw, and repl commands invoke prompter in one of three ways: when invoked with the -editor prompter option; by an en- try in the .mh_profile file; or by a command at the What now? prompt. If you do not specify an editor in any of these ways, MH provides prompter as the default editor for all of these commands. For information on how to use a different editor with MH commands, see the reference pages for the appropriate commands, and also mh_pro- file(4). Composing a Message with prompter When you create a message with an MH command, the mail system provides a message template for you to fill in. This template consists of two parts: the message header, comprising a number of header fields; and the body of the message, which is the area where you type the text of your message. The prompter editor displays each header field, one at a time, for you to fill in. Fill in the component by typing the text that you want. Type <RETURN> to move onto the next component. Once you have moved on from a header field, you cannot edit what you have entered. If you want to leave a header field empty, simply type <RETURN>. You can continue a header field over one line by typing a back-slash (\) before the <RETURN>. Continuation lines must start with a blank (a space or a tab). The start of the message body is indicated by a blank line or a line of dashes. If you are creating a new message, the cursor is placed be- neath this line to allow you to enter text. If there is already some body text in the message (for example, if you are using an existing draft, or if you are forwarding a message), you will receive a prompt: --------Enter additional text or: --------Enter initial text The cursor is placed under the prompt to allow you to enter text. To finish the message, type <CTRL/D>. You will then receive a prompt asking What now?. See whatnow(1) for more details of responses. An interrupt, usually <CTRL/C>, during component typing will abort prompter and the MH command that invoked it. An interrupt during mes- sage-body typing is equivalent to <CTRL/D>, for historical reasons. FLAGS -prepend -noprepend Adds text to the beginning of the message body, so that the rest of the body follows. This is useful for the forw com- mand. You can suppress this behavior by using the -noprepend option. -rapid -norapid Causes the text not to be displayed on your terminal if the draft already contains text in the message-body. This is useful for low-speed terminals. You can suppress this behav- ior by using the -norapid option. -erase char Specifies the line-editing characters, where char may be a character or \nnn, where nnn is the octal value for the char- acter. -kill char Specifies the line-editing characters, where char may be a character or \nnn, where nnn is the octal value for the char- acter. The first argument to prompter which is not an option is taken as the name of the draft file, and subsequent non-flag arguments are ignored. The default settings for prompter are: -prepend -norapid RESTRICTIONS The prompter editor will not work with files with nulls in them. PROFILE COMPONENTS tab(+); l l. prompter-next:+To name the editor to be used on exit from prompter Msg-Protect:+To set protections when creating a new draft FILES $HOME/.mh_profile The user profile. /tmp/prompter* Temporary copy of message. RELATED INFORMATION capsar(1), comp(1), dist(1), forw(1), repl(1), whatnow(1), mh_pro- file(4) delim off prompter(1)