[Linux-disciples] Prompting in mutt

[Stephen R Laniel]

In the process of looking for something else on mutt.org, I
happened upon this:
http://shorl.com/hirotyryhuru

It's relevant to my concerns, and perhaps also to others'; I
know Andrew Pimlott had expressed some frustration with
mutt.

(Reproduced below.)

Every so often the topic of adding a scripting language to
Mutt comes up.  Most people don't understand the issues
involved, and why this hasn't been done so far.  It's not a
matter of the developers being lazy, it's just a very
difficult problem to solve aesthetically.

Probably by far the biggest issue would be of chosing
''which'' scripting language.  S-Lang is often suggested
since Mutt can already be linked against it to use its
screen management capabilities in place of ncurses.  The
problem is that everyone has their own favorite scripting
language (eg. Perl, Python, TCL, Scheme).  If scripting
support were ever to be added, it would probably follow the
model used by the GIMP, with its procedural database (PDB)
that allows you to write extensions in any language, and
make it available to any other script no matter what
language.

Engineering-wise, adding scripting to Mutt at this point is
difficult.  If you look at other applications with scripting
support, primarily editors, they all operate on one basic
mode (a buffer).  Mutt on the other hand has several
different modes--menus, pager.  Not all functions can be
applied to every mode (consider Emacs: even when you have
different major modes, there is still a concept of a
cursor-up or cursor-down operation).  So each instrinsic
function (the builtin functions available to scripts) would
basically have to keep track of what modes it is allowed to
be called from--messy. (ie, you can't call group-reply while
in the file browswer because that wouldn't make sense).

For the most part, the keyboard macros in Mutt allow you to
do most everything you need to do.  There are only a few
places where scripting support would really make sense.
* prompt in the middle of a macro is impossible
* applying a macro to all tagged messages
* arbitrary editing of the message header in compose mode
Complex motions can be accomplished already, so they are not
included here.

-- 
``[Cheney] knows, for example, there there has never been a
  war between two countries that harbored McDonald's
  franchises.''
 -John Perry Barlow, http://shorl.com/gygrelavesypo