Re: [nmh-workers] Unnecessary dependency on vi???

[Ken Hornstein]

>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