xmh
More info
- Creator
- Terry Weissman
- Type
- Mail client
- License
- MIT
- Source
- gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xmh
An X front end on top of the MH mail system, where each button in the window corresponds to an MH command run in the background.
MH stores every message as a file and is driven by separate commands: inc, scan, comp, repl, refile. Terry Weissman at Digital's Western Research Laboratory wrote xmh in the late 1980s as a window over exactly those: folder list, table of contents and message view built with Athena widgets, with the MH commands invoked under the hood. It requires a working MH 6 installation and reads ~/.mh_profile to find the mail folders. Donna Converse at the MIT X Consortium maintained it afterwards.
It was one of the first real applications in the X distribution, something used daily rather than just a clock, and so served as a test bed for the Athena widgets and Xt. Weissman moved on to Netscape, where he wrote Bugzilla in 1998. xmh itself lingered in x11-apps long after MH users had moved to exmh or mutt, and today stands mostly as evidence of how interfaces were once built by wrapping commands.