Hmm, arguably I have my bad days, and then I have my worse days…

Tomorrow can’t get much worse in terms of work, I hope : Nearly 0500R, so no time for a proper days log; I really need to stop staying up so late.

At the moment, I’ve nearly got nail configured to my needs. The addition of macros and IMAP support is a real improvement over the old Berkeley Mail program. With a little more adjusting, I just might be able to dig into my back-log of mail sometime lol. So far, I only have one major complaint – no line editing at the prompt beyond the most basic level (provided by the terminal). That’ not really a problem though, it allows that old ed like terseness, it’s easy to keep the commands short.

Software, like physical tools should empower users to get work done efficiently, A little bit of learning how to use the program, is worth it when the reward is productive.

One thing I’ve also come to enjoy, is a useful trick for generating HTML manual pages. The mail/heirloom-mailx port installs as /usr/local/bin/mailx on FreeBSD, corresponding manual page being /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz. Because nail has a big manual page, it’s worth while to use a web browser or a text editor with tabs, in place of the usual $PAGER used by man.

$ zcat /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz | groff -Thtml -man > ~/mail.1.html
$ firefox3 ~/mail.1.html &

which is much more fun then my shell alias:

alias   man-nail="man -M /usr/local/man mailx"