Chapter Introduction (Making MH Work Your Way)

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Whether you use MH or a front-end like xmh, some part of it might not work exactly the way you want it to. For a lot of the work, you don't have to be a programmer -- just follow the instructions here. Usually, you'll be making a change to your MH profile.

This chapter and the Chapter New Versions of MH Commands show you how to extend MH itself. The Chapter Introduction to UNIX Programming with MH has tips for writing programs that build completely new functionality around MH. Later parts of the books have chapters that explain how to customize front ends (xmh, exmh, and mh-e), but the information in these earlier chapters will help you adapt the parts of MH that front ends use.

This chapter starts with overall information about how MH commands work. You'll see how to use different MH directories -- including other users'. You'll read about how draft messages are built. Here are some ways to customize MH and, for example, xmh:

Up to now, this book has covered switches for specific MH commands. There are other overall configuration entries you can put in your MH profile. Many of these affect both MH and front-ends.

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Last change $Date: 1996/06/06 15:08:56 $

This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.

Suggestions are welcome: Jerry Peek <jpeek@jpeek.com>