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<title>Writing Your Own Draft Message Editor(s): MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers</title>
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<h1>Writing Your Own Draft Message Editor(s)</h1>
<p>
You may want to do more than an editor like <i>vi</i>
or <i>emacs</i> can do to a draft message. For instance, you might
want to start <i>prompter</i> on the new draft, then run a second
editor to fill in the body. Or you might want to do something
automatically each time a draft message is edited, like updating a
mail message log. Or you could customize the way that a particular
MH program, such as <i>dist</i>, handles a draft message. These
are all good reasons to write a special editing shell script.
<p>
There are five things to know before you write your editor script:
<ol>
<li>
Each of the four mail composition commands will make a draft
message for you. If no other editor (including <i>prompter</i>)
has touched it, the draft will contain:
<ul>
<li>
For <i>comp</i>, an empty copy of the <i>components</i> file.
(Exception: with <i>comp -use</i>, draft will be exactly as it
was left before.)
<li>
For <i>repl</i>, the result of the <i>replcomps</i> file, with
the original message filtered through the <i>-filter</i> file
(if you used one).
<li>
For <i>forw</i>, a copy of the <i>forwcomps</i> file, with the
forwarded message(s) (filtered through <i>-format</i>
or <i>-filter</i> if you used one).
<li>
For <i>dist</i>, a copy of the <i>distcomps</i> file.
</ul>
For more information, see the Section
<a href="senove.html#Mak">Making the Draft from the Template
File</a>.
<li>
The full pathname of the draft message will be in
the <tt>$1</tt> parameter.
<li>
You can use the environment variables listed in the
Table <a href="getenv.html#EnVatMHS">Environment Variables that
MH Sets</a>.
<li>
Your editor should save the edited draft in the same file
(<tt>$1</tt>) where it read the draft from.
<li>
If your editor exits with a zero status, <i>whatnow</i> will
prompt the user <tt>What now?</tt>. But, as the Section
<a href="wormes.html#AbDrMe">Aborted Draft Messages</a>
explains, if your editor exits with a nonzero
status, <i>whatnow</i> will abort without sending the message,
and:
<ul>
<li>
<a name="index2"></a> If the <i>mhuse</i> variable is set to 1
(the <i>comp -use</i> program is being used), your draft message
won't be deleted.
<li>
Otherwise, the draft message will be deleted.
</ul>
</ol>
<a name="index3"></a>
<a href="e-distpr.html"><i>distprompter</i></a>, an editor shell
script, acts like <i>prompter</i> to read the message header of a
message you're distributing with <i>dist</i>. When it's done
reading the header fields, it saves the draft and exits without
giving you a chance to type the body (you can't type a body for
<i>dist</i>).
<p>
Even if you don't run <i>distprompter</i>, it's a good example of
what you can do with an MH draft editor. To
run <i>distprompter</i> or another editor that you write, put an
entry like this in your MH profile:
<pre>
dist: -editor distprompter
</pre>
If you write a more general purpose shell script editor for all
the MH message composing programs, you can use an MH profile entry
like this instead:
<pre>
Editor: <i>myeditor</i>
</pre>
One more note about editors: even though the
<i>mh-profile</i>(5) and <i>whatnow</i>(1) manual pages have a lot
of details, they don't explain an editor's environment or the
effect of its exit status very thoroughly. I wrote this little
test editor script that helped me learn. Maybe it'll help you:
<pre>
#! /bin/sh
echo The environment of $0:
printenv
echo "Command line had: '$*'"
echo -n "Enter exit status for $0: "
read stat
exit $stat
</pre>
Run it by typing, for example:
<pre>
% <b>comp -editor testedit</b>
</pre>
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