[arch] Unicode and email clients

[A. S. Budden]

On 27/02/07, Richard Gananathan <rgananathan at gmail.com> wrote:
> A while ago I switched to mutt for my email client because I heard good
> things about it. I think the thing I like the most about it is being
> able to write my messages with vim. (Pretty lame reason eh?)

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.  I wish more programs would allow the
user to choose their own editor rather than including some dreadful
built-in one with no more functionality than Windows Notepad.

> One day I sent an email to a Japanese friend and he told me that he
> couldn't read it. I also cannot read Japanese emails in mutt.
>
> So I have a bit of a problem. Is there a unicode fix for mutt? If so
> that would be good but I don't think I'd be that lucky. Even if there
> is, I didn't see a pacman package or aur pkgbuild, and I have never
> compiled from source before so it might be tough.

I used to use mutt & vim (before I started having to use Windows more
than I would like: I now use gmail+vim) and I never had a problem with
viewing Japanese text.  Have you checked your locale settings include
UTF8?  You could also try using muttng (mutt with a few patches) if that
doesn't help [1].

>
> What are some other good email clients that have unicode support. I
> haven't gotten too deep into mutt's features so if I pull out now I can
> still live. I'd be sold if I could use vi with it.
>
> In fact while I'm at it, there isn't a way to use vim in the text entry
> boxes for web browsers is there? Am I dreaming too much?

There are two plugins for firefox that I know of that do this: "View
Source With" [2] and "It's All Text" [3].  "It's All Text" is
ergonomically better (it puts a little "edit" button in the bottom right
hand corner of your textarea box), but I prefer "View Source With".
"View Source With" has two advantages in my book:

1) You can use it to view the source of the page in Vim as well
2) It uses less random file names (for example, this file is named
   "mail.google.com_mailmsgbodyta_01172491420804.txt", so I can use an
   autocmd in Vim to automatically run ":setf mail" when editing these
   files).

To use "View Source With" after installing & setting up, right-click on
the text area and choose "View Source With", then "Gvim".

Hope that's been of some help,

Al

[1] http://www.archlinux.org/packages/search/?q=muttng
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/394/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4125/