Email Client with Vim Editing

Question

I've been using vim for about 5 years now and have grown quite effective with it, to the point where writing things without vim feels so painfully slow. Just about everything that I write, I write in vim with the exception of email. All of my email accounts are google hosted, and right now I just use the Gmail interface. Is there a good client that I can easily setup so that I can write all my emails in vim (and not just copy paste when I'm done)?

Answer 1

Try mutt. You can use external editor with that, default is vim. The navigation is all similar to vim too.

Answer 2

Use It's All Text! to make your text boxes (including the GMail plain text compose box) editable in an external editor. Or you can set $EDITOR to vim and use alpine.

Answer 3

I know the question was posted almost six years ago, but for anyone else who in the future might land here while trying to figure out how to get vim into every aspect of their lives, I recommend checking out the wasavi extension. Essentially, Ctrl-Enter will start a vi buffer within the textbox your cursor is currently in. Do all your vi magic and hit ZZ and you're done!

Works in Gmail (which was my primary use case when looking around for something like this, hence why I ended up here). In fact, this answer was typed using vi from within the textbox. Hopefully wasavi will meet your needs. I know I am absolutely loving it.

Answer 4

Any command line email client will let you use your preferred command line editor. The common ones are:

• mutt
• alpine (formerly known as pine)

Personally I've been loving sup recently. It's kind of a cross between mutt and GMail. It does tags and search really well, and I increasingly love the whole model of how it works.

Answer 5

I use the ViewSourceWith Firefox plugin for this. Type Ctrl+Shift+U to use gvim to edit the text currently in the text box and just exit gvim (ZZ or :wq) to put your edited text back in the text box.