What is plum?  Well, basically, it's a mail reader, but that's like
saying that emacs is an editor or that UNIX a disk I/O system.  It uses
MH as its underlying interface, so people already used to MH will find
it very easy to use.  Think of it as a combination of the following
programs:  all the mh programs, vi, dired, rn, tcsh, and of course
perl.

I was deeply frustrated with xmh -- see the attached signature for my
feelings about GUIs; had too many years invested in MH to use a simpler
but less functional mailer like elm; and would be damned if I was going
to jump into emacs and LISP just to get at mh-e.

I wanted something easy for my fingers to deal with, something that let
me get through a lot of mail as quickly as I could, something that was
faster than MH by itself, and something which was infinitely extensible
because I knew that my idea of what keys did what or what functions did
what wouldn't be the same as the next guys, plus of course my own ideas
would change.

Thus was plum born.

Like Stallman, I needed an extension language that was interpreted, one
which would give me dynamic binding and scoping and autoloading.  It
should come as no surprise to anyone here my now that I should have
chosen perl for this purpose.

It will come in 4 parts.  This is part 0.  Part 1 is auxiliary readme
files and configuration stuff.  Part 2 is the first half of plum,
everything down to the __END__ line.  Part 3 is everything below the
line.  Read the INSTALL file for how to put these together and run them.

There's no documentation yet, besides this file, the other readmes, and
the source.  I happen to be of the opinion that if you need a manual to
use something, it's too darn complicated.  :-)  Plum looks and feels much
like vi.  You can check out ":set all" for some of the user-settable
features.  Hit :help or h or ^h for current bindings.  You can start up a
folder with a sequence like "unseen +inbox" or "last:30".


Plum has been used by about 40 people so far, some of which reported
having a clean +inbox for the first time in years.
I couldn't keep my +inbox clean without this.  May you find it half
so useful.


--tom

ps: Attention perl hackers:  plum is around 5000 lines so far, and will
    probably be twice that before it's "done" and released to a real
    comp.sources.* group.  It contains examples of just about every element of
    black art that perl has ever spawned, and was the source for a lot of the
    ideas in the Perl Purity Test.  Besides autoloading, multithreadedness,
    internal debuggery features, and catch/throw flow-control tricks, we've
    got some pretty elaborate data structures, like lists of lists of lists,
    c2ph-style list-structures, and associative arrays of records which
    themselves contain aggregates.