Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!apple!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: Default editor switches in .mh_profile
Message-ID: <1991Mar17.190959.12763@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 17 Mar 91 19:09:59 GMT
References: <9103111635.AA03682%caligula@ansa.co.uk>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Followup-To: comp.mail.mh
Organization: North Coast Public Access Un*x (ncoast)
Lines: 45

As quoted from <9103111635.AA03682%caligula@ansa.co.uk> by eo@ansa.co.UK (Ed Oskiewicz):
+---------------
| Does anyone know of a way to provide startup arguments to the Editor:
| specified in your .mh_profile?
+---------------

You can't.  You can sometimes play other tricks, however:  run a shell script
for your editor, which passes arguments (emacs) or sets $EXINIT (vi).

+---------------
| Then I get the following error msg from csh
| unable to exec emacs -f text-mode: No such file or directory
+---------------

MH doesn't use csh, it uses the exec?p system call.  ("?" because I haven't
checked to see if it uses execl or execv.)  Since the exec() doesn't do
argument splitting, the whole string is taken as the editor name.

+---------------
| I guess that its trying to start an editor called "emacs -f text-mode". The
| same sort of error happens if I sprinkle quotes around any of these 3 tokens.
+---------------

Correct.  The man page mh-profile(5) says this.

You can use the trick I mentioned above to do this.  But if you're just trying
to force text mode on a buffer, what you're doing may not work anyway, most
likely.  (I don't remember if -f executes in the previous file's buffer or
not.)  Better is to put this in your .emacs:

  (setq auto-mode-alist (append auto-mode-alist
			        '(("/Mail/draft$" . text-mode))))

(Approximate; I rarely get the (append) vs. (list) right.  I've got the actual
code at work, but the modems are screwed up so I can't grab it....)  If you
use a draft folder, you can hardcode that into the regexp or you can write
code to extract it from .mh_profile.

Hope this helps a little,
++Brandon
-- 
Me: Brandon S. Allbery			    Ham: KB8JRR on 2m, 220, 440, 1200
Internet: allbery@NCoast.ORG		(QRT on HF until local problems fixed)
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