PROMPTER(1mh)

💖 PROMPTER 💖

okay bestie, we're doing prompter from the nmh manual, section 1mh, and honestly? she's the quiet one in the group chat who does everyone's homework and never says anything. let's give her the main character moment she deserves 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

prompter — nmh's prompting editor front-end 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

prompter [-help] [-version] [-erase chr] [-kill chr] [-prepend |
     -noprepend] [-rapid | -norapid] [-doteof | -nodoteof] file

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so prompter is an editor front-end for nmh that lets you compose messages fast — like, actually fast. here's the tea though: you don't normally call her yourself. she doesn't work like that. instead she takes the place of an editor and acts as an editor front-end. she operates on an RFC 822-style message draft skeleton specified by file, which is normally handed to her by the nmh commands comp, dist, forw, or repl. 🫶

she's particularly useful when you're composing messages over slow network or modem lines. (modem. yes. we know. she's been around, she's iconic, let her live.) she's an nmh program in that she can have her own profile entry with switches, but she is not invoked directly by the user. instead, the commands comp, dist, forw, and repl invoke prompter as an editor, either when invoked with -editor prompter, or by the profile entry Editor: prompter, or when you give the command edit prompter at the What now? prompt. so many ways to summon her, all valid ✨

for each empty component prompter finds in the draft, you get prompted for a response. a <RETURN> will cause the whole component to be left out — gone, ghosted, not in the draft. otherwise, a `\' preceding a <RETURN> will continue the response on the next line, which is how you get multiline components. and listen: continuation lines must begin with a space or tab. that part is not a suggestion, bestie, it's the law 💀

every non-empty component gets copied to the draft and displayed on the terminal. both. no shortcuts.

the start of the message body is denoted by a blank line or a line of dashes. if the body is non-empty, the prompt — which isn't written to the file, it's just for you — is:

--------Enter additional text

or, if -prepend was given:

--------Enter initial text

message-body typing is terminated with an end-of-file (usually CTRL-D). with the -doteof switch, a period on a line all by itself also signifies end-of-file. at that point control is returned to the calling program, where you're asked What now?. for the valid options to this query, go see whatnow(1). 📖

by using the -prepend switch, you can add type-in to the beginning of the message body and have the rest of the body follow. this is useful for the forw command.

by using the -rapid switch, if the draft already contains text in the message-body, it is not displayed on your terminal. useful for low-speed terminals. (respect the low-speed terminals. they're doing their best. 🥺)

the line editing characters for kill and erase may be specified by you via the arguments -kill chr and -erase chr, where chr may be a character; or `\nnn', where nnn is the octal value for the character. cute and customizable 💖

an interrupt (usually CTRL-C) during component typing will abort prompter and the nmh command that invoked it. an interrupt during message-body typing is equivalent to CTRL-D, for historical reasons. this means that prompter should finish up and exit.

the first non-flag argument to prompter is taken as the name of the draft file, and subsequent non-flag arguments are ignored. one file only, babe.

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• $HOME/.mh_profile — the user profile
• /tmp/prompter* — temporary copy of message

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🦋 PROFILE COMPONENTS 🦋

• prompter-next: — to name the editor to be used on exit from prompter
• Msg-Protect: — to set mode when creating a new draft

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

comp(1), dist(1), forw(1), repl(1), whatnow(1)

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🌈 DEFAULTS 🌈

• `-prepend'
• `-norapid'
• `-nodoteof'

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⭐ CONTEXT ⭐

None

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🍓 HELPFUL HINTS 🍓

the -rapid option is particularly useful with forw, and -noprepend is useful with comp -use. noted. written down. memorized. 💅

you may also wish to link prompter under several names (e.g., rapid) and give appropriate switches in the profile entries under these names (e.g., rapid: -rapid). this facilitates invoking prompter differently for different nmh commands (e.g., forw: -editor rapid). basically: aliases, but make it nmh. obsessed 😭

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💀 BUGS 💀

prompter uses stdio(3), so it will lose if you edit files with nulls in them. that's not me being dramatic, that's the manpage. respect the nulls. fear the nulls. 🙈

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and that's the whole vibe check, bestie — this page came from nmh-1.8, dated 1999-04-30, and it ate, no crumbs. go compose something gorgeous 🫶✨🧚💜