Re: [Nmh-workers] Pager output on mhshow

[Ken Hornstein]

>It'd be useful to make it easier to have two mechanisms. HTML, I
>normally view through w3m. I even have pdftotext as the default for PDF
>but normally I view e-mail over remote ssh. So at home, I often do
>mhstore followed by firefox/zathura/evince/soffice/whatever instead of
>using mhshow.

Err ... that _would_ work with the proposed scheme, right?  I mean, assuming
you had a profile entry that used w3m to convert the HTML to text, this
would continue to work.  So I'm unclear why we need two mechanisms.

>A way to show only the first text part would be nice. I currently use
>-part 1 which sometimes goes wrong.

I'm trying to understand why you wouldn't want to show all text parts.
It seems like 90%+ of the emails I get have a text part (either plain or
HTML) as the first item, then non-text content afterwards.

>In my current scripted solution, I simply run mhlist at the end (fed
>into the same pager). I think a final summary of parts at the end is
>more useful than having the markers interspersed with text sections in
>the order they appeared. It is also more useful on multipart/alternative
>if I decide to view the non-default part.

Hm.  Maybe with a -list option?  I'll think about it.

>It'd be nice to have any markers configurable at least to the extent
>that I can add escape sequences for colours.

Hrm.  That might be worthwhile.  Maybe make the marker configurable with
mh-format?

>Another thing that comes to mind is that I've virtually never seen an
>attachment with a description (as output by mhlist and in your example
>marker) but filenames are very common.

Content-Description headers have sort of fallen by the wayside.  I just
looked at my mailbox and the only two I see are from fellow nmh users.
To make it useful you'd have to have a user actually type something in
that made sense ... and nowadays who's going to do that?  Other than
Ralph, of course.  The nmh attach does put in one, but it's just the
filename.  I do put something useful in on occasion, but like you said,
they're rare.

I guess the meta-discussion I was to provoke was: this would convert mhshow
from displaying all content if it was able to ONLY displaying text content
(by default).  Are people confortable with that?

--Ken