Re: From Jiang: question about dialog and mutt
On 2007-09-21, Jiang Qian <jqian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all:
> I'm trying to implement this script for checking whether I
> forget to put on attachment. I try to follow this procedure:
> http://wiki.mutt.org/?ConfigTricks/CheckAttach
> The only difference is that I want to use a text based dialog
> instead of zenity. The reason is that I'm accessing my mailbox on a
> remote computer through ssh. I can forward Xdialog or zenith dialog box
> via x11 over ssh, but that slows down the whole thing considerably, and
> defeat the purpose of having a text based client. I'm a text console
> purist:)
> Now I wanted to to implement it in the following manner. In
> place of zenity, I used
> dialog --title "mutt" --clear \
> --yesno "Have you added your attachment?" 10 30
> The problem is that when I do this, the mutt simply hang on the
> sending mail screen. My understanding is that zenity want to draw a
> dialog box like this:
> http://physics.harvard.edu/~jqian/dialog.png
> But mutt does not surrender the text terminal display. I tried
> various ways to suspend mutt but cannot get it to work. Is it a
> fundamental limitation of mutt in text console, and I have to give up
> and use graphic things like Xdialog or zenity instead? Or is there a way
> to let mutt give up the screen for a sec and display my choice dialog?
Mutt doesn't lock the display when it calls sendmail--it has no
means to do so--so this isn't a matter of mutt not surrendering the
display. This appears to be a problem with your script. Not being
able to see or try your script, it's hard to tell.
This is just a hunch, but since the script's stdin is connected to a
pipe from which it receives the message text, you may have to tell
dialog to use /dev/tty as its stdin and/or stdout, something like
this:
dialog --yesno "Can you see me now?" 20 20 < /dev/tty > /dev/tty
HTH,
Gary