What is exmh?

An Introduction by the author, Brent Welch , welch@acm.org

Exmh is an X user interface for MH mail. MH provides a set of UNIX commands that manage folders and mail messages. MH has a zillion features as a result of several years of availability. Exmh provides a graphical interface to many of these features, but not everything. You can do all the ordinary things like viewing the messages in a folder, and reading, deleting, and refiling messages. In addition, the interface handles arbitrary nesting of your folder hierarchy.

What exmh supports well is sorting arriving mail into different folders before you even read them. You can sort with the MH .maildelivery filtering mechanism, procmail, or any system that adds new messages to the unseen sequence of a folder. exmh provides an easy way to find newly arrived messages after they have been squirreled away. It highlights what folders have new mail, and within a folder it indicates which messages have not yet been read.

MIME format messages are parsed and displayed. MIME is a multi-media mail standard that allows transmission of images, audio, enriched text, FTP pointers, etc. via email. While there is some support for composing MIME messages in the current version, the composition facilities need a little more work.

You can use your favorite editor to compose mail messages, or you can use a simple built-in editor that provides some Emacs-like keybindings. With the built-in editor you can compose text/enriched (bold, italic, underline, etc.), and you can create multipart messages by inserting files of various MIME types.

Exmh is written in TCL/TK . The implementation is open and flexible. There are several levels of customization:

Each module of the implementation exports a few knobs and dials in a preference interface. There about 20 modules, so there are altogether way to many knobs at this point. But, hey, the table-driven implementation makes it easy to export settings.
The button and menu structure is defined via X resources, You can easily add more buttons or menus to invoke new functionality that you add to exmh.
TK widget attributes such as colors, fonts, and cursors, are controlled by X resources. You add make site-wide or personal resource definitions to tune the appearance of exmh.
Exmh supports a personal library of Tcl extensions. You can provide new functionality and add a button for it. In addition you can override parts of the implementation. This area could be stronger with the addition of more hook points so you do not have to override a whole module, but this will improve over time.

THANKS

To Sun Microsystems Laboratories and my manager, John Ousterhout, for supporting my current exmh work, and to the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC, which supported the initial development of exmh.

Many thanks to Scott Hutton who took my feeble attempt at an exmh home page, plus my on-line manuals, and produced a nice set of web pages.

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