Message mode and emacsclient

[Ian Zimmerman <itz@buug.org>]

To read my mail these days I use mutt over a ssh connection to the mail
server.  On the mail server I always have an emacs --daemon running, and
I tell mutt to call emacsclient as the external editor when I need to
compose a message.  I use the predictable temporary filename pattern in
auto-mode-alist to put the client buffer into message-mode (more
precisely, gnus-article-edit-mode which inherits almost everything from
message-mode).

All this works almost perfectly, with one annoying nit.  Immediately
after I land in emacs with the temporary file loaded, if I try one of
the message keybindings to move to a header field (for instance, C-c C-f
C-s to move to the Subject: field), after the C-c C-f emacs barfs with
"C-c C-f is undefined".  But when I try the same key combination again,
it works!  And it also works if I do anything else in the buffer first,
such as C-g.  It is as if emacs was in some kind of temporary mode like
those modes used in the minibuffer and had to quit the temporary mode
first to allow normal editing.

Does this sound in the least bit familiar?  My hunch is that it may not
be specific to message-mode but may be a more generic buglet with
emacsclient and multilevel keymaps.

Oh and btw, GNU Emacs 23.4 .. I know, I know ..

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