What is the easiest way to set thunderbird to use with gvim or vim?

Bill Joy taught me how to use "vi" in the 1980s, and being seriously disabled, I made it work. In recent months, though, Ifind that the mutt mailer by itself no longer works.

I do know how to read and write HTML, so I can read and write the kind of I/O required by Thunderbird. What I need to understand is how to make Thunderbird work with vim (or gvim). Is there anyone who can help me with this?

TIA,

Gary Kline

1 Answer

Install the “External Editor” Thunderbird extension from

Configure the external editor.

Option 1: use gvim

This is an easy method which use gvim.

In External Editor’s Preference, set the Text Editor to:

gvim -f

Option 2: use vim in a terminal

If you prefer to use vim in a terminal as me, you may consider this option. Setting vim in the editor will simply fail.

First, create a script “callvim”:

#!/bin/bash
# we need a little trick to use vim inside gnome-terminal.
# Update on Oct. 22, 2013: This trick does not work on gnome-terminal 3.8.4
# the "--disable-factory" trick does not make the terminal run in foreground.
# You can use `gvim -f` or `xterm` instead.
# gnome-terminal --geometry=80x40 --disable-factory -e "vim $*" # use xterm xterm -e vim $*

Save it to a directory in your $PATH, such as ~/bin/, and remember to give it executable by ‘chmod +x callvim’.

Then, set the Text Editor in External Editor’s Preference to

callvim

How to use it

When creating or editing email, invoke vim to edit it by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E.

Edit the email in Vim and save and exit. The email in Thunderbird’s editor is changed.

Customize Vim for editing email

We can customize Vim to be a better email editor by set email-specific configuration in ~/.vimrc. Below is my configuration in .vimrc which set the text width to 68 charactors, set automatic spell check, default file encoding to be iso8859-1 and utf-8. Abbreviation is also available, which may be frequently used in writing email.

My email configuration in ~/.vimrc:

au FileType mail call FT_mail()
function FT_mail() set nocindent set noautoindent set textwidth=68 " reformat for 72 char lines " normal gggqGgg " settings setlocal spell spelllang=en " setlocal fileencoding=iso8859-1,utf-8 set fileencodings=iso8859-1,utf-8 " abbreviations iabbr gd Good Day!
endfunction

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