Archive-name: xmultibiff-v2.2 Submitted-by: badger@midnight.com Available via anonymous ftp from ftp.midnight.com! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release notes for version 2.2 (differences from 2.1): o Added a "preview" ability which turns xmultibiff into a mail/news reader. The header containing the from and subject lines is now a menu when the user clicks on it. Releasing the mouse button on an article will pop that article up in a window. o Added "graying" out of boxes with a count of zero. o Made Multibox widget be a superclass of the MenuButton Widget. This enabled the header shell be a SimpleMenu so that the user can select an article to read. o Added the SmeBSBE widget which is, essentially the SmeBSB object (used for menu entries) modified to allow menu entries to be multiple lines. o Made the "last" parameter have a maximum of 100 so that the user won't chew up all available memory. o Added the "-bc" command-line option and the "*bc" X resource. When this switch is used, xmultibiff will work in "backward-compatible" mode. That is, it won't allow mail of news reading in popup shells. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Xmultibiff Xmultibiff was created because I needed a good Xbiff for multiple mailboxes. I also wanted the ability to see at a glance how many mail messages were in any given mailbox and who the messages were from. Displaying the number of messages also solves the problem of the binary nature of most Xbiffs. You can have mail, leave your workstation, and instantly be able to detect if you have more mail messages when you come back. Xmultibiff also incorporates a feature which will let you monitor newsgroups in the same way you monitor mailboxes. It parses your .newsrc and uses NNTP to monitor any given group or groups. It will keep constant track of how many unread articles are in a specified newsgroup(s). Also, when new articles come in, it will pop up the From and Subject lines of the article just like it pops them up for mailboxes. This version of Xmultibiff incorporates a new "preview" capability that turns it into a mail and news reader. When you click on a box, a menu will pop-up with the headers of all unread articles or mail messages. If you drag the cursor to any given article or mail message and release, the selected article or mail message will pop-up in a separate shell window so that you can read it instantly. If you are an old user of Xmultibiff and don't like this feature, you can use the "-bc" flag to make it behave like it used to. Xmultibiff uses the Athena Widget library, so if you don't have that, you have to send me a Motif or OpenLook version :-) To build: % xmkmf % make If you don't have xmkmf, try to use the provided makefile. Try: % copy Makefile.noX Makefile % make The Makefile may need to be edited to fit your system. If you want to install the program, the application defaults file, and the man page in the places appropriate for your system (and you have the permissions) try: % make install % make install.man If all goes well, you will get the program xmultibiff. To run it read the man page to find out which of the extensive options you like and then type: % xmultibiff <options> -mail <mailboxes> -news <newsgroups> Since I am biased towards bash, if you have your MAILPATH environment variable set to a colon separated list of mailboxes, you do not need to specify mailboxes on the command line. xmultibiff will parse MAILPATH and use that. It will also set the time that it polls the mailboxes to whatever is in the MAILCHECK environment variable. Similarly, the NEWSPATH environment variable represents a list of news groups to watch. I would also suggest that you look at and possibly customize the file XMultibiff.ad before you install it in the application defaults directory on your system. You may also want to keep your own custom X resources in your personal X resources file (usually .Xdefaults). Another source of help is the "Examples" directory. This contains some examples as to the myriad of customizations you can do to your xmultibiff. To learn of the usefulness of multiple mailboxes and incoming mail processing, check out procmail written by S.R. van den Berg. It can be used to sort your incoming mail into separate files, start programs when mail arrives, and a host of other things. A recent version can be gotten from ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (137.226.112.172) in pub/unix/procmail.tar.Z. Since NNTP traffic may unduly load your network and get your sysadmin mad at you, I would suggest setting a fairly long time for polling newsgroups. Also, make sure its not so long that your NNTP connection times out. Something on the order of 5 minutes should be good. For some reason, some NNTP connections at certain sites are "stale". That is, once you open them, they never pass new information so you a never notified when new articles come in. I believe this to be a problem with news and not xmultibiff. However, I have come up with a workaround to open and close the NNTP connection with each NNTP request. Edit the Imakefile or Makefile.noX to add -DSTALE_NNTP to the compile line to activate this feature. I would also suggest not using variable width fonts for the window that will popup the contents of either mail or news articles. Xmultibiff makes a fairly lame attempt to give you a 80x24 window for the article. Variable width fonts can really throw off the calculations and you may get huge windows as a result. More at Midnight ---------------- Make sure to check out other cool things at ftp.midnight.com. Among them is Ticktalk (author Art Mellor - who got me to start Xmultibiff). It displays the time in words in your choice of more than 20 languages! It is far better than any other clock you could possibly run on your X-Windows display. Thanks to: Bob Shaw for pointing out bugs and making cool suggestions. Mike Fleishner for designing such a cool xmultibiff icon. Bill Pemberton for sending me his improvements (called "xbuffy") on parsing mail boxes. This allows the "new" option so that only new messages are counted. Gregory Gulik for allowing me to use the code he developed (nntplist.c) to provide the feature that watches news groups via NNTP. Michael Kinstrey for adding the "command" option to execute a system command with a button click Daryl Sayers for the changes to get it to compile under SCO Unix Jan Akalla for the cahnges to get it to compile under SYSV Art Mellor for the function to count mail GNU Project for the function to parse the mail header (taken from bash) xpbiff all the authors, for the code to popup the mail header box. Please e-mail all added features (and any problems you may have). If you want to be placed on a mailing list to automatically receive new releases, send me e-mail to badger@midnight.com
