Next: More help Previous: Finding interesting meetings Up: An introduction to Discuss

Saying something

There are two ways you can enter a new transaction in a meeting. To start a new chain, use the talk command ( t for short), enter, or send. Discuss will ask for a subject which will be printed at the head of the message. It will then ask you to enter the text of the message -- a C-d or a ``.'' on a line by itself is used to signal the end of the text. If you prefer to use an editor, you can type, or if you realize at any point while entering the message that you want to edit it, type e<RETURN> (Yes, that's a twiddle, then an `e', then the RETURN or ENTER key.) on a line by itself, and Discuss will start up the editor defined in your EDITOR environment variable, with whatever text you have already entered already entered into the editor. Alternatively, if you prefer to use an editor most of the time, you can use setenv to set a variable called DISCUSS_EDITOR to the pathname of whatever editor you prefer to use, and it will be called automatically each time you enter a transaction. In this case, if you wish to enter a message without using the editor, you enter talk -no_editor.

The other way of entering a transaction is to reply to an existing transaction. For this, use the reply command ( rp for short). This will start up the editor as with talk. The transaction will be entered as a response to the current transaction (by default), or the transaction specified.