Re: [Nmh-workers] Re: Replace mh-format?

[Jerry Peek]

Comment #1:

On 22 December 2005 at 14:57, Bill Wohler <address@hidden> wrote:
> Which gives me another idea for nmh from MH-E: create a width format
> that uses the widest value in the range given to it.

I'm not clear what you mean by "the range given to it", Bill. 
But your point gave me a related (I think?) idea.

The -width option in scan(1) can be a pain.  The manpage says:

   The switch -width columns may be used to specify the width of
   the scan line.  The default is to use the width of the terminal.

When people design complex scan format files -- or format files that
are used to extract data from a message (not intended to be displayed
on the terminal) -- they have to decide how many characters will be
in the output.  Because email addresses, subjects, etc. all vary in
width, these pre-set width limits can be a pain.  One example of
this is the scan.more format file in
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/mh/mhstr.htm#index19 .

I'd like to see the -width option modified to have an "unlimited"
setting, maybe "-width 0", that outputs all of whatever escapes
we specify.  (Of course, this could could produce quite a bit of
output with the %{body} escape... let the coder beware... :)


Comment #2:

The %{body} escape is handy; it lets you see the first few words of
a message in a scan listing.  But it was designed before multipart
MIME messages.  Now the scan listings often look like this:

  869 12/15 To:"Stark, Sandr  Re: Ireland via Iceland<<This is a multi-part

I'd like to see a new componemt escape, maybe %{bodyt} or something,
that shows the first body text past the MIME body header.  That text
might be base64-encoded gibberish, but that's no worse than what we
see now...

Jerry