mh-e
The Emacs Interface to MH
by Bill Wohler
Edition 1.2 for mh-e Version 5.0.2
August 1995
Copyright (C) 1995 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the section entitled "The GNU General Public License" is included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.
These chapters introduce another interface to MH that is accessible through the GNU Emacs editor, namely, mh-e. mh-e is easy to use. I don't assume that you know GNU Emacs or even MH at this point, since I didn't know either of them when I discovered mh-e. However, mh-e was the tip of the iceberg, and I discovered more and more niceties about GNU Emacs and MH. Now I'm fully hooked on both of them.
The mh-e package is distributed with GNU Emacs, (1) so you shouldn't have to do anything special to use it. But it's important to note a brief history of mh-e. Version 3 was prevalent through the Emacs 18 and early Emacs 19 years. Then Version 4 came out (Emacs 19.23), which introduced several new and changed commands. Finally, Version 5.0 was released, which fixed some bugs and incompatibilities. This is the version covered by this manual. section Getting Started will help you decide which version you have.
If you don't already use GNU Emacs but want to learn more, you can read
an online tutorial by starting GNU Emacs and typing C-h t
(help-with-tutorial). (This notation is described in
section GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions.) If you want to take the plunge, consult the
GNU Emacs Manual,
from the Free Software Foundation.
If more information is needed, you can go to the Unix manual pages of the individual MH commands. When the name is not obvious, I'll guide you to a relevant MH manual page that describes the action more fully.
I hope you enjoy these chapters! If you have any comments, or suggestions for this document, please let me know.
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>
8 February 1995