Preferences

After you have used exmh a little, explore its capabilities: Click on the Preferences button. The preferences scheme has two levels, mainly because there are so many knobs and dials:

1. At the top level, you see a set of buttons that correspond to different modules of the implementation. Clicking on one of the buttons brings up the preferences items for that module.
2. This second-level window has general information about how the preference items affect the module. Each preference item has its own label. You can get more information available about each item by clicking the first mouse button on the item's label. The Figure below has an example.

Figure: A second-level preferences window

You can set three types of options through the Preferences dialog:

• Choices are represented by radio-style buttons; only one button in the set can be enabled at once. Changes take effect immediately.
• Booleans are represented by check-style buttons. A dark checkbox shows that the option is on. Changes take effect immediately.
• Numeric and filename settings have entry widgets in which you can type in a new value. Press <Return> for the change to take effect immediately (or choose Save).

To cycle through all the preference dialogs, use the Next button. Next takes you to the next preference section. The Prev button brings you back. You should take time, at least once, to go through all the Preference sections and get an idea of what sort of options are available.

If you like your settings, click Save in the main Preferences dialog. That saves the values as X resource settings in your ~/.exmh-defaults file. Click Reset All in the main dialog to restore all the settings to those of your last Save. Each module's preference dialog has a Reset button to reset only that module's settings.

NOTE: If you click Dismiss in the main dialog, some preferences may have been set for the current session, but they won't be saved to your ~/.exmh-defaults file.

[Table of Contents] [Index] [Previous: Chapter Introduction (Customizing exmh)] [Next: Preference Sections]

This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.