Re: To mbox or not, that is the question! (fwd)

["Monique Y. Mudama" <spam@bounceswoosh.org>]

On 2004-04-28, Mike M penned:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 02:35:32PM -0400, Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote:
><snip>
>> 
>> Alright, so I'll take a quick look through muttrc(5) for you ... ...
>> In your .muttrc put this line :
>>     set mask=""
>> Now, in the *file browser* mutt won't hide dotfiles.  (I suspect
>> that's what you are referring to above, the file browser)  Note that
>> that affects the *file browser* only, not whether or not mutt is
>> capable of reading and writing and in general using the mail folder.
>
> That solves that mystery...and raises some new questions.
>
> 1. What the heck does this mean anyway: "!^\.[^.]"? (the default value
>    of mask)

It's a regular expression.

Let's see ... 

! is 'not'
^\. is a period at the beginning of the expression
[^.] is 'not' something ... I'm not sure exactly what this does.

Okay, now I'm really confused.  When I set the mask to the default
explicitly, all I see is '..'  ... But if I turn off my explicit mask
and launch mutt with no value set, it shows me all non-dotfiles ... but
when I query for the value of mask, it shows the same value that only
got me '..' before.

Um, in any case, I use the following in my .muttrc, which shows me all
files, even ones beginning with a dot:

set mask=".*"


> 2. What's the alternative to the file browser?

Probably the index screen, or the mail viewing screen ... 

-- 
monique