You'll make most changes to xmh with resource entries;
Section Changing How Commands Work explains that.
This section explains xmh command-line options.
As explained in the Chapter
Key Parts of the UNIX Filesystem,
MH keeps messages, folders, and
other files in a directory.
By default, xmh looks for a subdirectory named Mail in
your home directory.
You can change that by
changing the Path: entry in your MH profile.
Or, you can use the -path option to xmh
(but see the NOTE in the Section
Conflicts Between xmh and MH Customization).
For example, to use a directory named .Mail (the dot at the
start of the directory name hides the directory from the ls
command), you might start xmh this way:
xmh -path /xxx/yyy/.Mail &
where /xxx/yyy is your home directory.
NOTE:
As explained in Section Sharing Other Users' Folders, everyone in a group can share an
MH directory if they have UNIX filesystem permission to read and write
to the directory.
But this might not be a good idea with xmh, because xmh keeps a
"snapshot" of each folder in a hidden file named .xmhcache.
If one xmh user changes the contents of a folder (packing it,
moving messages, and so on) the other user won't see the changes until
xmh rebuilds its .xmhcache file -- or the user selects
Rescan Folder.
Worse, if a folder isn't writable, you can mark messages for
deletion, copying, and so on -- when you use CommitChanges, xmh gives you an error but can also update the
table of contents to show that the changes have been made!
The Rescan Folder command will usually get you back to reality.
But, if you need to use unwritable folders, think about using MH instead.
Normally, xmh begins with a view of your inbox folder.
You can change that with the -initial command-line option.
For instance, to start with your project folder, use a line such as:
Because xmh is built with the X Toolkit, it recognizes standard
toolkit command-line options.
For a complete list, see your online
X(1)
manual page.
Here are a few of the options:
-iconic
Starts xmh as an icon instead of an open window.
The icon will have the folder name (like inbox) in it.
See the -flag option, too.
-flag
Tries to change the xmh icon into a mailbox.
The icon can look different if there's new mail.
The new icon with xmh Release 5 was more neatly drawn.
I like the older one, shown in
the Figure below.
Set the foreground and background colors, respectively.
-bd is the border color.
For instance, the following command would make red text on a
dark blue background, with a yellow border and lines (don't tell
my artistic friends that I said you could do this!):
xmh -fg red -bg navyblue -bd yellow &
-xrm
Lets you use other resource entries without typing them in
your resource file.
For a partial list of these, see the Section
Changing How Commands Work.
Here are a couple of useful examples.
To make a pick window that's wider than it is tall (you might
do this to get room for lots of Or buttons), type:
xmh -xrm '*PickGeometry:600x450' &
You can use more than one -xrm switch.
For instance, to set the PickGeometry (as in the previous example)
and also disable the default HideBoringHeaders feature (which
scrolls off header fields like Received:), use:
