Email Client with Vim Editing

Question

I've been using vim for about 5 years now and have grown quite effective with it, to the point where writing things without vim feels so painfully slow. Just about everything that I write, I write in vim with the exception of email. All of my email accounts are google hosted, and right now I just use the Gmail interface. Is there a good client that I can easily setup so that I can write all my emails in vim (and not just copy paste when I'm done)?

Answer 1

Try mutt. You can use external editor with that, default is vim. The navigation is all similar to vim too.

Answer 2

Use It's All Text! to make your text boxes (including the GMail plain text compose box) editable in an external editor. Or you can set $EDITOR to vim and use alpine.

Answer 3

I use the ViewSourceWith Firefox plugin for this. Type Ctrl+Shift+U to use gvim to edit the text currently in the text box and just exit gvim (ZZ or :wq) to put your edited text back in the text box.

Answer 4

Any command line email client will let you use your preferred command line editor. The common ones are:

• [mutt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(e-mail_client))
• [alpine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_(e-mail_client)) (formerly known as pine)

Personally I've been loving sup recently. It's kind of a cross between mutt and gmail. It does tags and search really well, and I increasingly love the whole model of how it works.