[ILUG-BOM] Pine - IV

[Philip S Tellis]

Making effective use of Pine - IV
=================================

Today we'll look at advanced commands in pine.  The first option is
enable-aggregate-command-set.  This allows you to apply a single command
to a group of messages.  Useful if you want to delete or save all messages
that meet some common criteria.  The next option, enable-bounce-cmd, is 
used to bounce messages.  If you've ever received mail that you wanted 
forwarded, but wanted to make it look like it had come from the original 
sender, then use the bounce command.  The access key for bouncing a 
message is B.

You may want to enable the flag commands, which allow you to set certain 
flags on messages.  You could flag a message as important, so that it 
shows up with an asterisk in your message index.  You can also use these 
to unset the Answered, Deleted or New flags.

Enable-full-header allows you to use the H access key to see the full 
header of received messages.  This is useful if you want to see the full 
path that the mail has travelled to get from its source to its 
destination.

Enable-goto-in-file-browser allows you to tell the file browser exactly 
which directory you want to go to by typing in its path.  This is useful 
if you need to attach files that are not in the current directory.  It's 
much faster than navigating to the directory every time.

Enable-jump-shortcut allows you to jump directly to a message in your 
message index by typing in its number and pressing Enter.

Enable-partial-match-lists and enable-tab-completion affect the behaviour 
of selection entries.  For example, if you wanted to save a message to 
another folder, just pressing s and Ctrl+X (for the partial match), will 
show you all folders that start with s.  Alternately, if one presses 
sa<Tab>, and there is only one folder starting with sa, then the folder 
name is automatically completed.  This is similar to the way commands are 
completed in bash.

In Advanced User Preferences, the few that you may want to set include 
auto-move-read-msgs, enable-mouse-in-xterm, enable-newmail-in-xterm-icon, 
save-will-advance, and use-current-dir.  The first will move read messages 
to the read-messages folder when closing the folder, if one was set.  
We'll see more on this when we deal with incoming-folders.  
Save-will-advance moves to the next message after saving the message.  
Use-current-dir uses the directory that pine was started in as the default 
for Takes and Exports.

If you find yourself using the same set of commands every time you start 
pine, for example, pressing I to get to the message index, you may want to 
put those commands in the initial-keystroke-list.  Anything put here will 
be treated as if you entered it through the keyboard when starting pine.

Moving down, we come to character-set.  It will normally be set to 
US-ASCII, but too many people today use iso-8859-1, so it may make sense 
to set it to this.  If you have a favourite text editor (pine's default is 
pico), then you can set that in editor.  vi seems to be a good choice.  
The speller is the program that is called when you do a Ctrl+T in compose 
mode.  It is supposed to check and correct spellings.  The default is the 
unix spell command that only returns a list of misspelled words.  Do not 
set this value to spell, leave it blank instead.

The composer-wrap-column is the column number where the composer will wrap 
long lines.  Setting it to something like 72 or 74 will take care of extra 
characters added by the reply indent string set when replying to messages.  
The reply-indent-string is by default set to >.  It's probably not a good 
idea to change this, because many mail clients rely on this string to 
display original text and current text in different styles.

The reply-leading is what shows up at the top of the message when you 
choose to include the original text in the reply.  Pine has a very 
customisable reply-leadin, but you'll have to explore that on your own.  
It allows you to include conditions, and variables in your leadin.

Display and sending filters can be used to modify mails before sending or 
after receiving.  A typical use of this would be to sign your mails with 
PGP and then to decode it when received.

Alt-addresses are a very useful feature when replying to mails.  Let's say 
you have many email accounts, and you use pine to read all of them.  When 
you reply to a message, and choose to reply to all recipients, pine will 
also reply to all your other addresses.  By putting those addresses in 
here, pine will detect that they are your addresses, and that they 
shouldn't be included in the reply list.

url-viewers, which is the last option that we will modify, allows you to 
set the program that is spawned to view urls in the mail.  You'd probably 
want to start something like netscape if you are running X, but lynx or 
some other text browser if you are not.

I have my url-viewers set to this:

   _TEST("test -L $HOME/.netscape/lock")_ "/usr/bin/netscape -remote 'openURL(_URL_, new-window)' &"
   _TEST("test -n '${DISPLAY}'")_ "/usr/bin/netscape _URL_ &"
   "/usr/bin/lynx _URL_"

Yes, all three lines.  Pine will execute everything in _TEST()_ and if it 
evaluates to true, will execute the rest of that line.  Over here, I first 
check to see if netscape is already running, if so, then call 
netscape -remote.  If not, then if the DISPLAY variable is set, call 
netscape.  If the DISPLAY variable is not set, then call lynx.

You could probably omit the first line, because your netscape startup 
script already does that check.  Notice that netscape is started in the 
background, while lynx isn't.  This is so because lynx runs in the same 
window as pine (in the shell), while netscape starts its own window.

It's not easy to enter this string in the configuration screen, so you may 
want to type it directly into your .pinerc file.  Just search for 
url-viewers.

The next time, we'll look at incoming-folders, and that will conclude this 
series on pine.  There's obviously much more you can do, but you'll have 
to figure that out yourself.  This should get you started on your way.

-- 
"Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing."
-- Karl Lehenbauer


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