Choosing an Editor

Mutt doesn't come with its own facility for writing email because on Unix/Linux systems (etc.) more good quality text editors are available than you could ever hope for. So it's just a matter of choosing whichever one you like the best. Then, whenever you go to write a new email, mutt will launch your editor for you. When you exit the editor, that text will be transfered to mutt and incorporated into your email ready to send. Which editor you choose is a personal decision. Set it with the command ``set editor='' and enjoy. The following lines are some samples; note four of them have been commented out leaving emacs -nw as my editor of choice. When I get sick of emacs, I just comment out that line and uncomment another one, and I'm ready to go. I tend to mostly switch between emacs and jed, as jed is a little faster and lighter-weight, but emacs is more feature rich. Again, it's personal.

A final note: the editors I use tend to be console based, so no external windows are launched and I can work as easily at a virtual console as I can in an xterm window. If you don't use the console and live in the XWindow environment, you can launch a GUI editor like emacs, xemacs, nedit, kate, kwrite, gedit, and so on just as simply, paying only the price of a slightly slower launch time. To set your editor, choose one of the lines below and remove the hash mark at the beginning, leaving the other lines as comments:

# set editor="vim +':set textwidth=77' +':set wrap'"  
#use vim with wordwrap at 77
  set editor="emacs -nw"
# set editor="joe"
# set editor="jed"
# set editor="pico"