hotedit.icn: Program to edit a Mosaic hotlist

June 23, 2000; Gregg M. Townsend
Requires: Unix, NCSA Mosaic
This file is in the public domain.
===> IMPORTANT NOTE:  This program was written for "NCSA Mosaic 2.4"
===> and is incompatible with the current version of Mosaic.

Hotedit makes it easy to edit the "hotlist" used with NCSA Mosaic,
a program for grazing the Wide World Web (WWW).  The Mosaic hotlist
is a text file, and it can be edited directly, but this is difficult
and error-prone.  Pairs of lines must be kept together, and the long
"Uniform Record Locator" (URL) lines make it hard to pick out the
title lines, which are of more interest.

Hotedit works by extracting the titles, bringing up an editor of the
user's choice, then processing the results when the editor exits.
The user can reorder, retitle, or delete lines; adding new entries
is best done within NCSA Mosaic.  It is vital that any editing
preserve the three-digit number at the front of each line; hotedit
uses this to reconnect the titles with the corresponding URLs.

The editor is determined by the environment variable VISUAL (or, if
that is missing, EDITOR).  The hotlist file is assumed to be in the
usual place, $HOME/.mosaic-hotlist-default.  Because not all editors
return a reasonable exit status, the hotlist is *always* rewritten;
the previous edition is saved in $HOME/.mosaic-hotlist-backup.

Hotedit shouldn't be run while NCSA Mosaic is running; when Mosaic
exits, it is likely to overwrite the edited hotlist.

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