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Created: January 13, 2005 Complexity: basic Author: Stanislav Minimum version: 5.7 Karma: 99/31 Imported from: Tip#851

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There is finally an extension for Thunderbird that enables you to compose mail in an external editor.

You can find it at http://globs.org/?lng=en

It works also in Windows 2000, as well as Windows XP and Linux as the author claims. I couldn't make it work at first. You have to start a new message, right click the toolbar and add an icon for External Editor. Now, when you click on the icon, your mail is displayed in Vim.

[edit] Comments

> Why not use a real mail client (pine, mutt) instead?

Because here at work I am stuck in Windows. I have tried using pine, mutt in Windows, even Sylpheed. They do not work as I expect.

At home I am using FreeBSD, and I am using Thunderbird as a mail client for our "family" address so my wife can use it too. The beauty is, she gets the default interface, and I can press Vim icon and get my preferred editor.

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> Why not use a real mail client (pine, mutt) instead?

Obviously you have never tried managing multiple IMAP accounts with mutt.

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The author has now fixed the bugs so that carriage returns are not shown in Windows and you can use "+set ft=mail" as an argument.

So my value for text editor is now

gvim.exe "+set ft=mail"

and it works very nicely.

If gvim is not in your path, you'll have to fully qualify it.

The docs say to use:

gvim --nofork

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That extension does not support multibyte language. When writing mail in English, it works well.

I copy the content from Thunderbird to Vim, and then :set syntax=mail, then edit it, then paste it back to Thunderbird.

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