Re: Where is my editor?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Sorry for the off-topic reply, but the mention of OpenBSD took me back.  I probably have a dozen OpenBSD shirts.  (I doubt I can fit in them anymore LOL!)  I have a pile of CDs of OpenBSD and FreeBSD releases.  When I started my last job in 2000, the first thing I did was fix the company email server.  I ran FreeBSD with Postfix on a Compaq rack mount server.  (So much easier than sendmail.cf!)  I had an uptime of over three years at one point.  Boy are those days gone.

I just received a copy of Kernighan's Unix A History and a Memoir.  While I knew most of the stories already, it was fun to see some pictures I hadn't seen before, and reading it took me back to those heady Doctor Dobb's and Microcornucopia days of my computer career youth...

---

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington.com@nongnu.org <nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington.com@nongnu.org> on behalf of Andy Bradford <amb-xmhe@bradfords.org>
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2024 7:28 AM
To: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org <nmh-workers@nongnu.org>
Subject: Re: Where is my editor?

 

Thus said Robert Elz on Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:10:26 +0700:

> Yes, I have had the "editor" line in my profile since MH days, (I have
> been a user since  almost forever) so what nmh did  as default I never
> knew, which is why I avoided saying that...

>From looking  at the past sources  it used to  use a C macro  defined in
h/nmh.h:

#define DEFAULT_EDITOR "vi"

I'm  curious  now  how  many  installations   of  nmh  do  not  have  vi
available... that being said, I do know Linux based OS developers make a
lot  of strange  decisions  about what  is  in the  "base"  OS, so  it's
entirely possible that vi may not exist in some flavors of Linux.

How  many non-POSIX  systems is  nmh running  on?


> I hope it is back working like you expected it now.

It is now, thanks.  I was able to figure out that EOT  was what ended my
experience with prompter  and changed the default  editor in .mh_profile
and then I  could just use "edit  vi" at the "What  now?" prompt. That's
how  I  composed my  original  email  starting  this thread.  It  wasn't
completely foreign  (being a long-time Unix  user I assumed it  was just
reading stdin and EOT would end it), just unexpected.

I suppose I could set EDITOR but I've never had to on OpenBSD.

Andy