Re: Defining session for emacs as mutt editor

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Haines Brown wrote:
> I want to have mutt (which is started from terminal) use emacs as its
> editor with its own initialization file. So in .muttrc I put:
> 
>   set editor="emacs -q -l ~/.emacsMutt"

Seems reasonable.  Alternatively you might consider setting
emacsserver and running emacsclient to connect to the running emacs.

> This defines an emacs session located on right half of my screen. My
> objective is to have the editor displayed to right of screen and the
> mutt messages remain displayed to its left.

I do not think that is possible.  Because mutt is going to invoke
emacs and then wait for it to exit before continuing.  Effectively
the editor process is stacked on top of mutt and mutt will only become
active again once the emacs process is popped off the stack.

> However, when the emacsMutt window starts, the mutt messages window is
> replaced by an empty emacs window, and as the result I no longer see the
> mutt messages. An -nw option only makes the emacsMutt session full
> screen.

What do you mean by an empty emacs window?  I think it should be an
empty mutt window.  Mutt cleared the display in preparation for
running the editor.  Then mutt is waiting for the editor to exit so
that it can continue.  In this case you told emacs in your .emacsMutt
file to open a graphics window and so the original terminal is empty
and waiting.

The issues are mutt specific.  I would take up the discussion on the
mutt-users mailing list.  Over here on the emacs side of things I
expect the suggesions will be to use vm or gnus where this is already
possible.  FWIW the ability to fork off an edit task asynchronously
from the mutt index is something I have also wanted.  But I don't
think anyone has written a way in mutt to do this yet.

Bob