[Nmh-workers] showing the n messages 'around' a particular message

[pmaydell]

A friend was trying to sort out a suitable shell alias/function for
doing a scan of the N messages 'around' the current one, by which I
mean something like "cur:-X cur:X" where X is N/2, except that if there
aren't X messages after cur you show more of the messages from before
cur, and vice-versa, and you don't give an error message if cur is
off the end of the folder or off the start or points to a message
you've just deleted. (The idea is that you want a "screenful" of
scan output, say, with cur somewhere in the middle.)

Anyway, neither of us could come up with anything that wasn't horribly
ugly. Is there some neat trick we missed or is it something that might
be worth adding to the mh-sequence syntax (as eg "cur:@N")? (A clever
shell function would be better, but there are limits to how many hoops
it makes sense to jump through to avoid extending nmh...)

-- PMM