Re: starting an external command from emacs

[Matt Price]

On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 18:08 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:
> Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:
> 
> > hi,
> >
> > i'm a not-especially-technical person who uses emacs as a
> > straightforward text editor; in fact i'm experimenting with living
> > inside emacs most of the time on my main laptop, largely to eliminate
> > distractions while i'm writing.  however, some significant fraction of
> > the stuff i write is intended to be emailed away.  I'd like to do two
> > things:
> >
> > (1) write a function that takes the contents of the current buffer and
> > inserts it into a message; 
> > (2) use an external script to query an already-existing contacts
> > database (for me it's evolution or gmail), and pass that address on to
> > the to-header of the resultant message.
> >
> > (2) seemed difficult to me.  so what i'm trying right now is to write a
> > function that invokes mutt with an address string, then, within mutt,
> > use emacsclient as my editor, post-mode as my mode, and insert the text
> > into the message body.  This is what i have so far:
> 
> Have you looked at VM, MH-E, rmail, GNUS?
> (Existing Emacs mail interfaces.)

hi dan,

i did look briefly at all of these, but two issues for me:

- all of them feel a little daunting 
- one of my problems right now is that my contacts info is spread out in
far too many places already -- mutt, evolution, and gmail, not to
mention my unsyncable palm.  i'd really like to be able to query these
databases directly -- mutt has various scripts that let you do this,
which is why i was drawn to it.  these scripts generally produce a
series of lines as output, one email address per line.  if i could write
a function that ran these ecternal scripts and took their output as a
list, from which the user could choose one as a to address... then i'd
certainly be willingt o use any of the already-existant emacs mail
readers.  the thing is, of course, that i'm really NOT looking to read
my mail -- i'm trying to avoid making that any easier -- all i want to
do is send my mail, and be able to use my contacts database from inside
emacs.  what woul you suggest i do?

thanks,
matt


-- 
Matt Price
matt.price@utoronto.ca