Vim as Thunderbird’s External Editor in Linux

Vim is an excellent editor which I use every day. Thunderbird is a nice email application. However, Thunderbird’s integrated editor is not efficient enough to a Vim user. Why not use Vim as Thunderbird’s editor? In this tutorial, we will introduce how to integrate Vim with Thunderbird together in Linux.

Install the “External Editor” Thunderbird extension

Download the “External Editor” plugin.

And install it to Thunderbird.

Configure the external editor

Option 1: use gvim

This is an easy method which use gvim.

In External Editor’s Preference, set the Text Editor to:

gvim -f

Option 2: use vim in a terminal

If you prefer to use vim in a terminal as me, you may consider this option. Setting vim in the editor will simply fail.

First, create a script “callvim”:

#!/bin/bash

# we need a little trick to use vim inside gnome-terminal.
# Update on Oct. 22, 2013: This trick does not work on gnome-terminal 3.8.4
#   the "--disable-factory" trick does not make the terminal run in foreground.
#   You can use `gvim -f` or `xterm` instead.
# gnome-terminal --geometry=80x40 --disable-factory -e "vim $*"

# use xterm
xterm -e vim $*

Save it to a directory in your $PATH, such as ~/bin/, and remember to give it executable by ‘chmod +x callvim’.

Then, set the Text Editor in External Editor’s Preference to

callvim

How to use it

When creating or editing email, invoke vim to edit it by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E.

Edit the email in Vim and save and exit. The email in Thunderbird’s editor is changed.

Customize Vim for editing email

We can customize Vim to be a better email editor by set email-specific configuration in ~/.vimrc. Below is my configuration in .vimrc which set the text width to 68 charactors, set automatic spell check, default file encoding to be iso8859-1 and utf-8. Abbreviation is also available, which may be frequently used in writing email.

My email configuration in ~/.vimrc

au FileType mail call FT_mail()

function FT_mail()
    set nocindent
    set noautoindent
    set textwidth=68
    " reformat for 72 char lines
    " normal gggqGgg
    " settings
    setlocal spell spelllang=en
    " setlocal fileencoding=iso8859-1,utf-8
    set fileencodings=iso8859-1,utf-8
    " abbreviations
    iabbr  gd Good Day!
endfunction