MultiMail 1.2 review
DownloadMultiMail is an offline mail packet reader for many systems, using a curses-based interface
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MultiMail is an offline mail packet reader for many systems, using a curses-based interface.
It supports the Blue Wave, QWK, OMEN, SOUP, and OPX formats.
Requirements:
Unix-compatible (POSIX) API, or Borland/Turbo C++
curses -- tested with ncurses 1.9.3+, Solaris curses, and PDCurses
GNU make may be required on some systems
What's New in This Release:
Added support for Microsoft Visual C++, MinGW, and Open Watcom. I highly recommend Watcom, and I'm now using it for the OS/2 port. I'd use it for the Win32 port, but sadly the directory scan (used in the packet list) is using the slow POSIX-emulation method rather the fast native method, and I haven't got that sorted out yet. MinGW is also very nice, and I'd use that, except that it needs MSVCRT.DLL, which doesn't come with old Windows 95. So -- rather than continuing with the 5-year-old Borland 5.5 (although it still works) -- I'm delivering an MSVC-built version. This version doesn't support set_new_handler(), but no one is likely to notice (famous last words). Also, I've finally dropped the pretense of supporting RSX/NT.
The starting directory and home directory are now added to the PATH searched for archivers and editors, so you can include them in the same directory with mm.exe. I'm taking advantage of this to bundle InfoZip's zip and unzip, hugely bloating the Windows zip, but hopefully stopping the complaints I get from people who can't figure out how to set up archiving themselves.
Support for the "GreekQWK" variant, which uses 0x0C instead of 0xE3 as the line delimiter. Reported by Dimitris Mandalidis. Note that there's still no particular support for the Greek _character set_, but you can probably make it work by disabling character set conversion.
A mouse click in the lower half of the screen, in the ANSI viewer, now counts as if the spacebar had been pressed, instead of PgDn. Also, when the screen is at the start, even clicking in the top half counts as a space. This makes for easier mouse-only navigation with the new welcome screen display.
Included Makefile.wid for wide-character ncurses. This doesn't really do anything yet, except give you the proper background character instead of the octothorpe, and work semi-decently in a UTF-8 Linux VT. For now,I don't recommend using it, nor distributing binaries based on it.
Various documentation updates.
Bug fixes and such:
Revisions for newest version of PDCurses -- fewer ifdefs needed. Note that MultiMail now must be compiled with PDCurses 2.7 or later.
Changed some compiler options to work better with recent gcc. Unfortunately it bloats the executable.
Removed the distinction between Bulletins and New file lists, so there's only one prompt to bother you with now.
Minor code cleanup.
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