MH & nmh: Folder Display
Author: Brent B. Welch

# Folder Display

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The top subwindow has a label for each of your MH folders. The folder display is highlighted to reflect the state of folders. The `Color Legend` menu item under the main Help menu displays a key for the highlights. The Table below lists the defaults. (The folder labels are at the bottom of the legend in the Figure Highlighting Key.)

Table: Default Folder Highlights

    Color    Monochrome      Meaning

    red      black           The current folder

    blue     bold outline    A folder with unseen messages

    yellow   stippled        The target folder for
             background      move and link operations

Folders that have nested folders under them are highlighted by a shadow box.

The mouse bindings for the folder labels are in the Table below.

Table: Mouse Bindings for Folder Labels

    Button        Action

    First         Change to folder.

    Second        View nested folders.

    Third         Refile current messages to the folder.

    Shift-Third   Link current messages to the folder.

Note that clicking the third button does two things at once. It selects the target folder for refile, and it marks the currently selected message(s) for pending refile to that folder. This might seem over-eager at first, but it's very handy once you get used to it. The currently selected target folder remains highlighted; to move a message to this folder, click the `Move` button or press m.

Clicking the second button on a folder label displays a popup window with the folder labels for nested folders. You can operate on these labels just like the top-level ones. The popups work recursively for nested folders as shown in the Figure below. When the mouse leaves, the popup is withdrawn. The `Folder Display` preferences lets you adjust the popup behavior.

Figure: Folder list

Hint: If you change the popup-related settings, you'll have to resize the exmh window a bit to force it to redisplay the folder labels. The new bindings take effect then.

You can make the folder display into a separate top-level window with a setting under the `Folder Display` preferences. This means you can close the main window and still view the folder display to see what folders have new mail in them. When you click on a folder label, the main window opens automatically.

The size of the folder display window is set in one of two ways. If the folder display is detached, just resize it with the window manager and exmh will remember the folder's size and position. If it is part of the main window, use the `Max fdisp rows` setting under `Folder Display` preferences.

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(This section was written by Brent Welch.)
Last change $Date: 1999/10/10 05:14:05 $

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.