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There's always Mutt

There's always Mutt

Posted Jun 29, 2004 20:25 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to graphical mail clients

I scanned the article looking for the one feature that I would expect all mailers to offer but rarely find.

I recently installed a plugin to Evolution 1.4 which allows it to use Vim as its composition editor. It works, mostly, although Vim running under Bonobo crashes sometimes. (Thus far I haven't lost any half-composed mail I cared about). My main complaint is in how Evo scrambles copies of messages being replied to.

KMail seems to have some ability to use a preferred editor. Any others?


to post comments

There's always Mutt

Posted Jun 29, 2004 21:34 UTC (Tue) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link] (6 responses)

In the quest for a user friendly Linux desktop there is little room for
well but strange baked cakes from the 70s and 80s. Deal with it.

There's always Mutt

Posted Jun 29, 2004 21:51 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

What is it that makes people think that vi (and 70s friends) and a desktop are mutually exclusive?!

Oh well. Who needs evolution + vim if you can have pine and pico. ;-)

There's always Mutt

Posted Jun 29, 2004 21:53 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I do deal with it. I use mail programs that do what I want them to do.

It would seem odd to start by assuming that anything I want is inherently ignorable. Generally, when I want something, somebody else wants it too. Maybe it's "obscure" from a marketing standpoint, and there might not be any profit in providing it, but that's not what Free Software is about, is it?

Maybe doing what people want even though "there's no market" is why Free Software is eating your lunch.

There's always Mutt

Posted Jun 29, 2004 22:49 UTC (Tue) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

Not the point.

This is a Unix-like system. It should be possible to plug in an external editor, whether it's vi-like, emacs-like, kedit, nano, or whatever. This is especially true when the user has a preferred set of keybindings and "feel" to an editor.

Actually, I'd claim that it would be highly reasonable for an e-mail client to open an external HTML editor if the user really wanted to send HTML mail. (Yes, there are occasions when it's justified). Depending on the situation (which should include knowing which MUA recipients use), this might allow for specialised editors that make it easy to send a particular type of very rich hypertext.

No-one who understands the power of pipelines complains that you shouldn't be able to pipe ls through sed "because sed is a strange-baked cake that has been superceded by Perl". The important thing is being able to plug in an editor, not what that editor is.

James.

(And yes, I do use vi and friends a lot...)

I do deal with it

Posted Jul 1, 2004 1:26 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

The lack of proper support for external editors is why I don't use Evolution or the Mozilla mail clients.

This is such an incredibly easy feature for the Evo or Mozilla developers to add that I can only conclude they're actively hostile to the idea.

So much for code reuse.

I do deal with it

Posted Jul 1, 2004 9:06 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It's also (amazing, but true) a feature that Gnus doesn't support.

(Perhaps the only one. :) )

I do deal with it

Posted Jul 8, 2004 15:29 UTC (Thu) by chmouel (subscriber, #6335) [Link]

Gnus doen't support the filtering to external editor ? And :

gnus-summary-pipe-output

It is bound to | or O p by default

VIM plugin howto?

Posted Jun 29, 2004 22:29 UTC (Tue) by colink (guest, #274) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd heard that it could be done but assumed that you had to manually recompile
Evolution to get it done.

What did you have to do to get it to work?

VIM plugin howto?

Posted Jun 30, 2004 3:33 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I apt-got a .deb of a patched Evo from Jason Hildebrand, the author of the plug-in. See http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/ to have all your questions answered.

There's always Mutt

Posted Jul 8, 2004 10:18 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

I urge you to try KMail with the kvim editor. It's plain vim but dressed up in KDE clothes and acts as a "component" of the parent program. Just change to editor to "embedded kvim".


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