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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: Headers - (Was Re: First time - this better work)


Article: 8898 of alt.hackers
From: 3ah21@qlink.queensu.ca (Hammond Andrew)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Headers - (Was Re: First time - this better work)
Date: 19 Oct 1995 19:03:53 GMT
Organization: Queen's University, Kingston
Lines: 56
Approved: Paul.Newman@VicHall.Queensu.CA
Distribution: world
Message-ID: 4667ep$hch@knot.queensu.ca
NNTP-Posting-Host: qlink.queensu.ca
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

Steve Holiman (stevehol@lucky.cloverleaf.com) thoughtfully declared:
: Andy Welch (andy.welch@lexis-nexis.com) wrote:
: : ObReplytoObNewsHack:

: : Wanna play headers...? Keep hearing talk about which newsreaders are
: : easier to post with... Well I use tin for reading, but XVNEWS for posting.
: : Mainly cos I HATE vi, which tin uses as it's text editor. (Yeah I'm NOT a
: : UNIX guru... sorry, but I'm learnin g)

: Tin normally uses whatever you have set up as your default editor.  I
: also prefer not to fight with vi for something as simple as news.  On my
: home system (I make _no_ assumptions for yours) my settings are in a
: hidden file in my home directory called ".profile" - change
your default
: editor to something friendly like pico (yes, I use pine for email) and
: next time you log in you're in business.  Oh, better go to your .tin
: directory and edit tinrc and set start_offset=off; vi lets tin set the
: cursor position in the command line call to vi and so far I haven't
: figured out if pico will do the same (looks doubtful).

It will.  In fact it uses _exactly_ the same commandline syntax for this
as VI.  The start offset is set using

pico +<starting line number> ...

Of course if you were going to write a new, more userfriendly editor to
replace VI, would you use a different syntax for the commandline?

: ObHack <deleted>

Well, I'm pretty low on hacks right now.  How about this one?  Since I
fancy myself as being somewhat UNIX literate, I decided to change my
login shell on one of my school accounts.  Well, tcsh was working
perfectly while I was exec'ing it from my .cshrc, but after I chsh'd to
it, it doesn't seem to be able to read my path.  The $PATH variable is
set and _should_ be working, but it isn't.  For example, I try ls or cat
and I get a 'command not found' error message.  Shell internal commands
work just fine, but that's not saying much.  I guess I'll have to RTFM,
again.  Oh well.  Anyhow, I _had_ to get a shell working.  ANY shell.
So, I sat down at one of the X console machines and logged in.  Since
we've got DEC machines they've got this little 'session manager' thingy.
The session manager will allow you to spaw programs.  Well, I looked
around in the session managers menu and found a 'DECTerm'.  I tried it,
but unfortunatly I got my crippled shell.  So, I think to my self: since
this is UNIX, there has to be _some_ way to customize the thing.  Sure
enough there was.  Now my applications menu contains a GNU EMACS
reference (since I guessed correctly that EMACS lives in
/usr/local/bin).  Well, the rest is fairly obvious.  I can't say I'm
enamoured with EMACS *shell* mode, but it got the assignment done.  Now
I've got time to monkey around with tcsh until I've got it back on it's
feet.

--
Andrew Hammond               3AH21@QLINK.QUEENSU.CA

"To know recursion, you must first know recursion."
					-unknown



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