Mac – How to use Cocoa Emacs as editor for Mutt

emacsemail

I'm taking yet another run at Emacs. I've installed Cocoa Emacs, and so far so good. Now I'd like to use Cocoa Emacs as my editor for Mutt. With MacVim, it's trivial to use Macvim, i just put:

set editor="vim -o -f" # editor to use when composing messages

in my .muttrc, and everything works. When I want to compose a mail, I type m in Mutt and a new Macvim window opens on top, when I quit, I'm in the Mutt mailing screen (where I can put in cc, attachments, and type y to send).

When I've found anything about using emacs with Mutt it's always been a very complicated explanaition.

Surely there is a simple way to get emacs to do this?

Thanks,

John V.

Best Answer

With Emacsclient, keeping Emacs running all the time

Emacs uses a slightly different setup than e.g. vim. The editor itself can remain active all the time (because you may have it open for other things as well) and you use a utility called emacsclient to connect to it (pass a file to edit) if you need it.

Add the following line to your config file (.emacs):

(server-start)  ; Starts server for (among others) emacsclient

Or, if you don't wish to keep the server for emacsclient running at all times, you may issue the command M-x server-start to emacs when you're ready to run. Issuing that command is probably the right thing to do when you're already running emacs, unless you want to reload .emacs.

All you have to do now is to make sure that MUTT uses emacsclient as its editor. You can do this by adding the following line to your config file (.muttrc):

set editor="emacsclient"

Recent versions of mutt (at least 1.4.1) require the following format:

set editor="emacsclient %s"

Source: Emacs and MUTT

Starting Emacs every time

set editor="emacs %s"

Related Solutions

Mac – Vim mappings / plugin for Xcode

There are XVim and xVim plugins for Xcode, they are made exactly for this.

You can also use KeyRemap4MacBook for this (from answer on stackoverflow and this blog):

enter image description here

Mac – Open Mail Attachment with Unix-standard programs

Okay, so you can do it for whatever Unix program you want to create a wrapper for.

Create an Automator application with a single action: Run AppleScript.

Make it run the following script:

on run {input, parameters}
        set x to "/usr/bin/vim " & quoted form of POSIX path of input
    tell application "Terminal"
        activate
        do script x
    end tell
end run

If you really want to use some other editor in place of vim, you could replace /usr/bin/vim in the second line of the script with the path to whatever command you are trying use to open files from Mail.