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(mh-e)From Brian Reid

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From Brian Reid
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   One day in 1983 I got the flu and had to stay home from work for
three days with nothing to do.  I used that time to write MHE.  The
fundamental idea behind MHE was that it was a "puppeteer" driving the MH
programs underneath it.  MH had a model that the editor was supposed to
run as a subprocess of the mailer, which seemed to me at the time to be
the tail wagging the dog.  So I turned it around and made the editor
drive the MH programs.  I made sure that the UCI people (who were
maintaining MH at the time) took in my changes and made them stick.

   Today, I still use my own version of MHE because I don't at all like
the way that GNU mh-e works and I've never gotten to be good enough at
hacking Emacs Lisp to make GNU mh-e do what I want.  The Gosling-emacs
version of MHE and the GNU Emacs version of mh-e have almost nothing in
common except similar names.  They work differently, have different
conceptual models, and have different key bindings.  (1)

   Brian Reid, June 1994

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) After reading this article, I questioned Brian about his version
of MHE, and received some great ideas for improving mh-e such as a
dired-like method of selecting folders; and removing the prompting when
sending mail, filling in the blanks in the draft buffer instead.  I
passed them on to Stephen Gildea, the current maintainer, and he was
excited about the ideas as well.  Perhaps one day, mh-e will again
resemble MHE, although none of these ideas are manifest in Version 5.0.