Re: Best way to use Mutt with Emacs? General pointers welcome...

[Chris Seberino]

Cristian & Michael

Thanks for replies!!  It is nice to hear from other
people in world with the same interests
trying to do the same things I am!!
I noticed the same problem regarding
inverse video for menus and highlightings
being gone when running Mutt inside of
Emacs.  I don't know how to fix this.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I am not convinced
yet that running Mutt inside of Emacs is better
than running Emacs inside of Mutt anymore! I don't understand
your comment that running Emacs first allows switching
between buffers rather than windows.... Why would
you need multiple files opened with Mutt??? (It is easy
to cut and paste with mouse between windows
the old way too by the way.) I only
use Mutt to type emails and usually only create one email
at a time.  I don't know if this extra feature is worth
all the headache I will get from display being messed
up as we all noticed with inverse video for mutt menu.
Are there any OTHER niceties I'm missing too??
Please advise.

Thanks and once again it is nice to hear from others
thinking of the same things I am thinking about!

Sincerely,

Chris


On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 03:07:16AM +0100, Cristian wrote:
> Hi Cris,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 04:58:35PM -0800, Chris Seberino wrote:
> > I fell in love with Emacs 
> 
> I understand that.
> 
> > and wanted to know how to better use Emacs & Mutt together.
> 
> Right.  I asked myself the same question when I began using Mutt a
> month ago (after having used Emacs for five years).
> 
> > Is there any virtue in running Mutt from within Emacs?
> 
> Yes there is!  Is is easier to share text data between buffers than
> between X windows.  And you do not need to switch windows, just
> buffers.  Emacs lovers love switching buffers and hate switching
> windows ;-)  In my opinion, any other way of using Emacs as Mutt's
> editor is just lame.
> 
> > What is the best way to do this???? I tried M-x shell
> > and launching Mutt from a shell in Emacs but that
> > was all messed up. Any suggestions?
> 
> Yep.  Shell-mode is for teletype-like interaction only.  If you want
> screen-oriented interaction (required by Elm, Pine, Mutt, etc.), there
> is another solution: terminal mode.  In Emacs, type ``M-x term'' to
> start it.  You will then be asked which program to run.  Just enter
> ``mutt''.  Emacs wizards will know how to customize this.
> 
> I've been running Mutt like this for 2 weeks now, and it works quite
> nicely.  If you haven't used terminal mode before, you need to get used
> to a few quirks.  The biggest one: All commands starting C-x are gone.
> To use them, you must prefix C-c, so instead of typing C-x b for
> switching buffers you now have to type C-c C-x b to get out of the
> *terminal* buffer.  Or use a pointing device to pull down a menu.
> 
> One more quirk: terminal-mode does not implement transparency in any
> way, so you cannot use color setting like this one in ~/.muttrc:
> color error brightred default
> Mutt will justly complain if you do.  I replaced all occurrences of
> ``default'' by ``white'', and it looks quite decent now.
> 
> Everything else works like you would expect it.  Even before I found
> out about terminal mode, I set my editor variable in ~/.muttrc thus:
> set editor="emacsclient --alternate-editor vi"
> For this to work, you should have a line in your ~/.emacs reading,
> (server-start)
> so that Emacs is ready to receive requests from emacsclient.  This will
> open up a new buffer.  When you're running Mutt within Emacs, the
> *terminal* buffer goes into the background while you edit your message
> (like you would expect).  For editing Mutt messages in Emacs, I highly
> recommend post mode (post.el) available from
> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/mutt/
> When using post mode, you just hit C-c C-c when you're ready to send
> your message.  This will usually take you right back to the *terminal*
> buffer where Mutt is waiting for you.
> 
> If emacsclient cannot connect to a running Emacs, the stuff after
> --alternative-editor is invoked.  If you really hate vi (which stands
> for vim on my system), you might want to launch a textmode Emacs if no
> Emacs is up.  In this case, try:
> set editor="emacsclient --alternate-editor emacs -nw"
> 
> Sometimes I want to use Emacs as a pager.  For this purpose, I came up
> with this awkward macro that temporarily sets the pager to emacsclient,
> then displays a message, then unsets the pager to use the built-in
> pager again (assuming that's what you usually do):
> 
> macro index \cv "<enter-command>set pager=emacsclient\n<display-message>\
>   <enter-command>unset pager\n" "display message in emacsclient"
> 
> Maybe I would always use Emacs as the pager but it's kind of weird to
> read emails in post mode.  How can I tell Emacs to use some kind of
> rmail-mode for reading, and post mode for editing only?
> 
> There's one more thing I should mention: I'm using GNU Emacs 20.7 on
> Linux 2.4.4.  I quickly tried to run Mutt within GNU Emacs 21.0 but
> there was more severe trouble with colors (status bar and help bar
> invisible).  If someone has a solution for Emacs 21, please report it
> here!
> 
> Cheers,
> Cristian
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> }{  Cristian Pietsch
> }{  http://www.interling.de



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