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msged 2.00 readme The following list the changes to msged from 1.99 to 2.00. It's a fairly significant list. Most, if not all, of this stuff is mentioned in msged.doc, this is mostly here as a quick reference. It's basically in reverse order of appearance. find now quits if you enter a zero length search string you can no longer scan all areas from the area menu. you can still do it via the '*' command in the reader though. the areas menu is cleaned up and laid out a bit better (at least in my opinion). the biggest implication is that autostart macros that go to the areas menu and scan for new messages should be changed to scan for new messages and THEN go to the areas menu.. msged attempts to avoid writing a new message over old ones. i don't multitask so i have no idea if this will work or not. the biggest problem i can foresee is that it may be susceptible to 'race' conditions where msged and the tosser fight over the highest message.... msged now remembers the last file name you wrote a message to... msged no longer clears the cost field or the times read field. and now increments the times read field when you read a message to you the first time. changed the clear line key in the field editor from <ESC> to <ctrl><X>. you can abort a message whilst entering the message header by pressing <ESC>. additionally you can abort from fields in the settings screen. if you don't have a config file msged will go directly to the settings screen. additionally, you'll have to play with the settings functions to determine exactly how it works. settings screen is back. now better than ever before. you can change just about everything (except the video addressing segment). this includes colors, area information, switches, attributes, everything that can be changed in the config file. and msged will write out a new config file for you as well... <alt><r> rotates text when entering a message, same as the < or > key when reading messages. first press is rot13, second is rot10, third returns text to normal. be warned! the text is echoed rotated, so it's tough to read what you type... msged now compares area paths instead of area tags. this allows you to assign multiple attributes (like uucp and netmail) to the same area. the first description given for an area is the one that is used. 1 msged 2.00 readme changed the way exporting to a textfile is handled. if in the editor, things work essentially as they did before. however, msged no longer asks if you want to rplace or append to the destination file. you specify this the same way you specify you want to append to the tosslog... if you want to append to the file, put a plus sign (+) in front of the file name. this applies to the <alt><w> command in the reader as well... however, there are some additional changes to this command, you can specify how you want the text export. if you append the string ",q" to the filename, msged formats the exported text the same way it does quoted text in a message. this lets you quote from a number of messages by quote exporting several messages into the same file (with append), then importing the file into a new message. the other option is ",t" or text. this tells msged to append a newline to the end of each line and puts a text header at the top of the message. this makes the file useful for exporting to other software. finally, if you specify no options at the end, the message is written out to the file with newlines only at the ends of paragraphs and no text header... this makes it useful for re-importing into a msged message. underscores (_) in the quote string are now converted to spaces hidden lines are not quoted unless you turn them on before quoting the message. unfortunately, this also turns on seen-by lines. full usenet/internet addressing is now supported in areas tagged as uucp or news. one caveat... msged looks for an @ sign to determine that what is being entered on the to line is an address instead of a name. if you are entering a bang path with no @, prefix it with a @, msged will strip the leading @ before writing the address to disk. since to, from and date are shown properly in the message header above the text, msged doesn't display them a second time in the actual message text quoting and replying to usenet/internet messages uses the correct addresses. usenet/internet address display is now done correctly. additionally, the true date a usenet/internet message was entered is now parsed from usenet header. 2 msged 2.00 readme message numbers are done slightly differently for consistency between quick and msg message bases. the number displayed on the top corner is which message out of how many, the real message number, i.e. the filename of a .msg file is displayed in parens after the area description removed all the secondary ways of doing things in the config file. if the sample config warned that a keyword was obsolete, it's probably gone in this version. removed support for the binkley colors statement (needed the space) the boss keyword is no longer supported in the config file. use a fully qualified address and the privatenet keyword. one more command has been added to the reader, scan. scan is initially bound to the * key (either will do). this command scans all areas for new messages. used in conjunction with next and prev area, you can check for mail without ever hitting the areas menu. added two new commands to the reader, next_area (+) and prev_area (-). if areas have been scanned (via alt-s on the areas menu), the commands go to the next and previous areas with unread messages in them, if no areas have new messages or if areas have not been scanned, then they move to the next and previous areas. config files are broken again. i've changed the way areas are declared in the msged.cfg file. the syntax is shown below: fido mail ATTRIB "description" path areatag quick uucp board # news local echo each line indicates an alternative value for a field. ATTRIB is zero or more of p,c,k,d and h indicating the default attributes for the message area, p being privileged, c crash, k kill/sent, d direct and h hold. the description must be enclosed in double quotes, unlike previous versions, single quotes no longer work here. path applies only to fido style message bases, if the area is a quick message base, this field is interpreted as a board number. areatag only applies to echomail areas. 3 msged 2.00 readme not only am i breaking config files, i'm breaking batch files too... msged now returns MUCH more information in the errorlevel. the following are additive... type of message entered errorlevel netmail 1 echomail 2 uucp mail 4 uucp news 8 local messages 16 so, if you enter a netmail message, a uucp news message AND an echomail message, msged will exit with errorlevel 11. as you can see, this gives you great flexibility in what you run when exiting, but it is going to require a significant batch file change. i'm including my readmail.bat in the distribution.. writing a message to disk now puts the area description in as well msged now lets you design the usenet style attribution line. it is done with the new command "attribution" in the config file. essentially, you put the attribution keyword followed by the string you want used into your config file. the default is: attribution In a message of <%m %d %h> %f (%a) writes:\n the percent (%) signs indicate a special format character follows. the format characters have the following meanings: %t name of person original message was two %f name of person original was from %a address of sender of original message %w day of week original was sent (3 letters) %d day of month original was sent (1-31) %m month original was sent (3 letters) %y year original was sent (00-99) %h time original was sent (hh:mm) %% a percent sign if you want a blank line separating the attribution line from the text, make sure you add the \n at the end... if you seem to be having trouble with your userlists, make sure that you don't have tabs in them, that will confuse things.. a common way of screwing up a userlist is to use an editor that converts multiple spaces to tabs added the area a message was forwarded from into the origination line 4 msged 2.00 readme on a forwarded message. this doesn't mean that you can automatically forward across areas (although you could easily write a macro to so) but it makes it easier to forward a message then move it somewhere else. delete word right is bound to <ctrl><t>, if you're on a word, deletes the word and trailing whitespace to the next word. if you aren't on a word, deletes whitespace to the next word. a word is anything surrounded by whitespace an intl line is put in the message whenever the destination zone is not the same as that in your primary address (the first one listed in your config files). if this is a problem i'll make it optional put in the infrastructure for fidozone support, will complete it as soon as i find out the proper formats opusdate format is now included. to turn it off use NO OPUSDATE, it will be mutually exclusive with FIDOZONE msgid's are now placed in echomail as well as netmail when you start a subject line with D:\ where D is a drive letter, msged will assume a file attach and set the attach bit accordingly. <ctrl><home> and <ctrl><end> go to start and end of message respectively when in the editor. <ctrl><pgup> and <ctrl><pgdn> go to the top and bottom of the screen backspace and delete now automagically reformat as you use them. a feature that deserves a bit more documentation is the paste buffer. when you use <alt><a>...<alt><c> to cut out a block of text, that block remains in the paste buffer until you cut another block out. this includes across editing different messages. this is useful when quoting from multiple messages, quote the first message and cut out the text you want, then abort the edit with <esc>. next quote the second message, you can now paste the quote from the first message into the quote of the second message using <alt><p> BROKEN CONFIG FILE ALERT!!! some of the configuration options have been 5 msged 2.00 readme changed. the following keywords have been eliminated: softcr, seen-bys, tearline, shownotes, confirm they have been replaced with a new keyword called "No". all of the above options now default to ON. to turn them off, use "No " followed by one of: softcr, seen-bys, tearline, shownotes, confirm, msgids, eids, strip msgids will turn off the automatic generation of a msgid and eids will turn off automatic generation of eids. strip will prevent msged from stripping pre-existing <ctrl><a> kludge lines from the message when it is written to disk. added support for secondary lastread pointers using the "lastread" config keyword, syntax is: lastread <filename> where <filename> can be any filename. it'll be the same in every message area though... video fossil support has been added to all versions of the program. one problem is that it means msged no longer compiles with production ZTC. #ifdefs will be added before release to compensate the "username" config keyword has been removed. use "name" or "sysop" instead this has been in a while, but i forgot to document it. if you list multiple addresses in multiple zones in your config file, when entering a message, msged will look for the first address with a zone matching the destination of the message and will use that as the originating address. added the "dos" command and bound it to ! when in the reader (sorry, not available from the editor). basically, this command executes a single dos command and returns to msged. it requires a keypress to return. this could be used to implement an external editor interface when combined with a macro. to have msged append to confmail.out instead of rewriting it, prepend a '+' to the filename in your configuration. 6 msged 2.00 readme added a nifty little feature to the areas menu... you'll notice that the vertical separator bar has been removed. but that's not the nifty part, when you scan areas using <alt><s>, msged will now display your current position in the area and how many messages are in the area. color settings are changed slightly. compatible for the most part, except that gray and brown are no longer recognized (use white and yellow). only three characters of the color are needed, i.e. magenta is mag, blue is blu and black is bla. if you append a + sign to the foreground color, you get high intensity, appended to the background gives blinking. the kludgeline config keyword is no longer necessary. all kludgelines are shown when you use the <alt><v> (view) command. to use quickbbs areas you need to add two new lines to your config file, the first is: quickbbs PATH where PATH is the directory containing the quickbbs msg*.bbs files. the other line associates board numbers with a descriptive area name. (this will be extended in the future). currently it is in the format: quick DESCRIPTION BOARD where DESCRIPTION is the area description (in double quotes) and BOARD is the integer board number (>0). the quickbbs message base takes significantly less disk space and is also faster. there are currently some things missing from the quickbbs support, namely, it can't be used for netmail, no reply threading and a few other miscellany. msged now saves and restores the current directory when shelling to dos home and end go to the first and last areas in the areas menu new quote string macro! the & (ampersand) expands to all initials, i.e. for the name "Randy Van de Loo", the string ">&:" would expand to ">RVdL:" 7 msged 2.00 readme NO linefeeds are put into messages, lines are terminated only by a carriage return soft carriage returns automatically added to usenet messages search now starts from the CURRENT message msged now uses the comspec to find the proper comspec message flags supported on a per area basis, use PDKCH before the area description, the old settings still apply to the first area. direct flag disables all gating for a message, sets xx2 attribute quoteright sets the right margin for quoted text. function 0 is an autostart macro, executes when msged is started. 8