>i have not run comp without first setting VISUAL for at least two >decades, but when i used to do this, it would print a message like "type >your message below, and then hit control-D" and then read from standard >input. when did that change to requiring an external editor? perhaps >that's where it all went wrong.
Since you asked ... Supporting the EDITOR/VISUAL environment variables is actually a nmh thing (and is actually a recent thing). That was added by me in 2013. Before that you had to configure it in your .mh_profile or via configure/mhconfig And I went back and looked at mh 6.8 and mh 5; they were the same way. I could find no support for any kind of simple read-from-the-terminal message input like you describe (I didn't feel like tracking down mh 4 or mh 3). I seem to remember that the old mail/Mail/mailx had that behavior, though ... is it possible you're conflating things? Ah, okay, I went back and double-checked things ... 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). 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 In nmh the fallback editor was always 'vi', from as far back as we have revision history. --Ken -- nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
