Hi Cris, On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 04:58:35PM -0800, Chris Seberino wrote: > I fell in love with Emacs
I understand that. > and wanted to know how to better use Emacs & Mutt together. Right. I asked myself the same question when I began using Mutt a month ago (after having used Emacs for five years). > Is there any virtue in running Mutt from within Emacs? Yes there is! Is is easier to share text data between buffers than between X windows. And you do not need to switch windows, just buffers. Emacs lovers love switching buffers and hate switching windows ;-) In my opinion, any other way of using Emacs as Mutt's editor is just lame. > What is the best way to do this???? I tried M-x shell > and launching Mutt from a shell in Emacs but that > was all messed up. Any suggestions? Yep. Shell-mode is for teletype-like interaction only. If you want screen-oriented interaction (required by Elm, Pine, Mutt, etc.), there is another solution: terminal mode. In Emacs, type ``M-x term'' to start it. You will then be asked which program to run. Just enter ``mutt''. Emacs wizards will know how to customize this. I've been running Mutt like this for 2 weeks now, and it works quite nicely. If you haven't used terminal mode before, you need to get used to a few quirks. The biggest one: All commands starting C-x are gone. To use them, you must prefix C-c, so instead of typing C-x b for switching buffers you now have to type C-c C-x b to get out of the *terminal* buffer. Or use a pointing device to pull down a menu. One more quirk: terminal-mode does not implement transparency in any way, so you cannot use color setting like this one in ~/.muttrc: color error brightred default Mutt will justly complain if you do. I replaced all occurrences of ``default'' by ``white'', and it looks quite decent now. Everything else works like you would expect it. Even before I found out about terminal mode, I set my editor variable in ~/.muttrc thus: set editor="emacsclient --alternate-editor vi" For this to work, you should have a line in your ~/.emacs reading, (server-start) so that Emacs is ready to receive requests from emacsclient. This will open up a new buffer. When you're running Mutt within Emacs, the *terminal* buffer goes into the background while you edit your message (like you would expect). For editing Mutt messages in Emacs, I highly recommend post mode (post.el) available from http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/mutt/ When using post mode, you just hit C-c C-c when you're ready to send your message. This will usually take you right back to the *terminal* buffer where Mutt is waiting for you. If emacsclient cannot connect to a running Emacs, the stuff after --alternative-editor is invoked. If you really hate vi (which stands for vim on my system), you might want to launch a textmode Emacs if no Emacs is up. In this case, try: set editor="emacsclient --alternate-editor emacs -nw" Sometimes I want to use Emacs as a pager. For this purpose, I came up with this awkward macro that temporarily sets the pager to emacsclient, then displays a message, then unsets the pager to use the built-in pager again (assuming that's what you usually do): macro index \cv "<enter-command>set pager=emacsclient\n<display-message>\ <enter-command>unset pager\n" "display message in emacsclient" Maybe I would always use Emacs as the pager but it's kind of weird to read emails in post mode. How can I tell Emacs to use some kind of rmail-mode for reading, and post mode for editing only? There's one more thing I should mention: I'm using GNU Emacs 20.7 on Linux 2.4.4. I quickly tried to run Mutt within GNU Emacs 21.0 but there was more severe trouble with colors (status bar and help bar invisible). If someone has a solution for Emacs 21, please report it here! Cheers, Cristian -- }{ Cristian Pietsch }{ http://www.interling.de
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