Message Composition Commands

These commands are active in and/or releated to Pine's COMPOSE MESSAGE screen.

Justify Command

Pressing Ctrl-J forces Pine to reformat the text in the paragraph the cursor is on. A paragraph is separated by one blank line. This is useful when you have been editing a paragraph and the lines become greatly uneven in length. Justifying when your cursor is on a formatted table or listing can have unwanted results -- if that happens, just press Ctrl-U immediately to unjustify the text you just justified.

Mark, Cut and Paste Commands

The mark feature (Ctrl-^) allows you to mark any segment of text, cut it out (Ctrl-K), move the cursor, and paste it (Ctrl-U) in the new location. You can paste the previously cut text more than once, allowing you to use this feature to copy a block of text into several locations of your message; however, you cannot cut text out of one message your are composing and then paste it into the next one with these commands.

If you press Ctrl-K without having marked anything, Pine will delete a single line. If you delete a group of lines together, Pine keeps them in the same buffer, so Ctrl-U will restore them as a block.

In Pine's internal help, the "set mark" key is shown as ^^ (two carets). The first "^" means you should hold down the "Control" key on your keyboard. The second "^" means "type the character ^".

Read File Command

With Read File: ^R, Pine allows you to insert text files prepared previously outside of Pine into a message you are composing. This allows you, for example, to create a long message you are planning to send with Pine in your favorite word processor, save/export it as a "plain text" or "ASCII text " file and then retrieve that file into Pine's message composer. Note: the file you retrieve into Pine must be in plain text format, not in the native format of your word processor. If you want to send someone else a file that is not plain text, attach it to your message rather than reading it into the message text area. You will be prompted for the name of a file to be inserted into the message. The file name is relative to your home directory or must be a full path name on your system. The file will be inserted where the cursor is located.

The file to be read must be on the same system as Pine. If you use Pine on a Unix machine but have files on a PC or Macintosh, the files must be transferred to the Unix system running Pine before they can be read. Please ask your local consultants about the correct way to transfer a file to your Pine system as the method will vary from site to site.

You cannot use any wildcards in specifying the file to be included. At the File to insert from home directory: prompt, you can type in the filename directly or use Pine's file browser: ^T to select one from the listing of files in your directory.

Attach File Command

The attach file command: Ctrl-J (with the cursor located in the header area of the message composition screen) is the primary means of attaching an external file as a MIME attachment. The attachment will be encoded to ensure safe delivery at the receiving end, which means that you can attach any type of file: spreadsheet, CAD drawing, desktop-published document, clipart graphic, and so on. However, the recipient of your message needs to have email software capable (more and more are) of handling MIME attachments.

The file to be attached must be on the same system as Pine. If you use Pine on a Unix machine but have files on a PC or Macintosh, the files must be transferred to the Unix system running Pine before they can be attached to the message being composed. Please ask your local consultants about the correct way to transfer a file to your Pine system as the method will vary from site to site.

You cannot use any wildcards in specifying the file to be included. You can type in the filename directly or use Pine's file browser to select one from the listing of files in your directory.

Postpone Message Command

Pine's postpone feature allows you to postpone your composition of a message, so that you can resume working on it at a later time. Pine confirms the postponement with:

      [Composition postponed. Select Compose to resume.]

Pine will postpone a message for the duration of the current session and even throughout subsequent Pine sessions. You may postpone as many messages as you like. (Pine stores all the messages you postpone in a folder called "postponed-msgs.")

Spell Check Command

(Note: there is no spell checker for the 32-bit version of PC-Pine as of 27 Sep. 1996. For the 16-bit version, see the section on spell-checking in Customization and Configuration in the Pine Questions and Answers.)

Pressing Ctrl-T calls up the standard spell checker, or an alternate program you specified in the speller variable in your configuration. The standard Unix spell checker reads in all the new lines of text (those which do not begin with the ">") and passes them through the spell checker. The spell checker does not provide alternative spellings nor does it remember correct words from session to session.

When you first use the standard Unix spell checker, it may appear that it is randomly jumping all around your message - actually, the spell checker processes your message one word at a time, in alphabetical order. Other spell checkers such as ispell for Unix operate differently and offer more features, such as creating a personal "dictionary" of words.

Rich Headers Command

Normally, Pine just shows you four header fields to fill out -- To:, Cc:, Attchmnt:, and Subject:. There are others -- Bcc:, Fcc:, Lcc:, Newsgroups: and possibly custom headers you have defined in your personal configuration -- which are also available but not usually shown. When you press Ctrl-R in the message header, you can see and edit these hidden fields.

Bcc stands for blind carbon copy. Addresses listed in this field receive a copy of the message, but are not visible to any of its recipients, including even those who received the blind carbon copy. (If you enter addresses both in the To: and the Bcc: fields, this can cause confusion among the Bcc recipients, who may think they accidentally received a message intended for someone else -- the addresses they see in the To: field -- and then forward it to them, so use this feature with discretion.)

New in Pine version 3.92 is the Lcc (List Carbon Copy) field, which combines the functions of the To: and Bcc: fields. It allows you to select a list of addresses from your addressbook and shows the name of the list -- but not the individual addresses in the list -- in the message's To: field, while delivering a copy of the message to each address on the list.

Fcc stands for folder carbon copy. This is the field to specify the name of the folder which should hold a copy of the outgoing message. The default-fcc field in Pine's configuration specifies the default folder to save outgoing messages into, but you can override that default on for any message you compose by changing the Fcc field in its header. In addition, Pine gives you the ability to specify an Fcc: appropriate for each entry in your addressbook -- a very useful feature if you organize your folder by correspondents.

The Newsgrps field allows you to select one or more Usenet newsgroups to which you want to post your message. For this to work, you have to have access to a news server, which can be specified in the nntp-server field of Pine's configuration screen; most institutions or Internet Service Providers operate their own news server and will have preconfigured Pine to access it, so you usually won't have to change this entry -- ask your local systems support staff if in doubt.