mh-e: From Jim Larus
D.2 From Jim Larus
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Brian Reid, while at CMU or shortly after going to Stanford wrote a mail
reading program called MHE for Gosling Emacs. It had much the same
structure as MH-E (i.e., invoked MH programs), though it was simpler and
the commands were slightly different. Unfortunately, I no longer have a
copy so the differences are lost in the mists of time.
In ’82–83, I was working at BBN and wrote a lot of mlisp code in
Gosling Emacs to make it look more like Tennex Emacs. One of the
packages that I picked up and improved was Reid’s mail system. In ’83,
I went back to Berkeley. About that time, Stallman’s first version of
GNU Emacs came out and people started to move to it from Gosling Emacs
(as I recall, the transition took a year or two). I decided to port
Reid’s MHE and used the mlisp to Emacs Lisp translator that came with
GNU Emacs. It did a lousy job and the resulting code didn’t work, so I
bit the bullet and rewrote the code by hand (it was a lot smaller and
simpler then, so it took only a day or two).
Soon after that, MH-E became part of the standard Emacs distribution
and suggestions kept dribbling in for improvements. MH-E soon reached
sufficient functionality to keep me happy, but I kept on improving it
because I was a graduate student with plenty of time on my hands and it
was more fun than my dissertation. In retrospect, the one thing that I
regret is not writing any documentation, which seriously limited the use
and appeal of the package.
In ’89, I came to Wisconsin as a professor and decided not to work on
MH-E. It was stable, except for minor bugs, and had enough
functionality, so I let it be for a few years. Stephen Gildea of BBN
began to pester me about the bugs, but I ignored them. In 1990, he went
off to the X Consortium, said good bye, and said that he would now be
using ‘xmh’. A few months later, he came back and said that he couldn’t
stand ‘xmh’ and could I put a few more bug fixes into MH-E. At that
point, I had no interest in fixing MH-E, so I gave the responsibility of
maintenance to him and he has done a fine job since then.
Jim Larus, June 1994
Info Catalog
mh-e: From Brian Reid
mh-e: History
mh-e: From Stephen Gildea