Subject: being friendly with alternate editors

From: Joel Boonstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 12:02:32 -0400 (EDT)

Hey folks,

I recently switched to using vim all the time for composing emails -- I
don't think I'll ever go back to pico, no offense to the developers.

There are, of course, tradeoffs to using a different editor in pine.
The major one that I see is that as soon as I enter my message text, I
can no longer see the headers of the email that I'm
composing/replying-to, so I have to end my editor, check that out, and
then go back to editing.

If I have a short attention span, I find myself doing this often.

I realize that it's probably not at all feasible to try and come up with
a generic way to embed my favorite editor into the pine window, so those
headers would be available to me.  Given that many editors are
definitely not text-only, this probably doesn't make sense to think
about.

However, would there be a way to, when invoking the alternate editor,
package up all the currently set headers and send them to the alternate
editor, along with whatever's going to be edited?  They could appear as
simply as Header: value, perhaps linewrapped in some manner.

Many problems come up immediately, of course.  What happens if I edit a
header in my alternate editor -- should pine try to parse my tmp file
after I save it and munge the headers appropriately?  What if I remove
all the headers?  Won't it be a pain to have all that header information
at the top of the message, thus making one move the cursor to where
message composition should start?   I don't know.  Probably.

At risk of invoking mutt, I do know that mutt uses vi implicitly, but I
don't know what its integration is like.  I'm not advocating a shift
towards being like mutt, since if I wanted mutt, I'd use it.  But have
other alternate-editor users run across similar wishes?  How have you
solved the problem?  Or should I just learn to live with it?

Joel

-- 
[ joel boonstra | [email-masked] ]

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