TITLE: Using vifm to attach files to emails in Mutt
DATE: 2019-02-15
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


I’ve found that the default file attachment browser in mutt is very
lacking, it requires lots of manually traversing directories to find
the file I want, and it doesn’t look great, it’s essentially an
interactive ls -l. I’ve started using vifm as a file manager in the
terminal for those rare occassions when I need a full file manager,
so I thought I would try to integrate that into my mutt, vim
workflow.

  {IMAGE}


I couldn’t figure out how to change the file browser that appears
when you type a on the composer view in Mutt, but I had read about
using external commands in Vim so thought maybe I could use those to
access vifm in the vim composer. I have Mutt setup so that when I
open a new email composer in Vim with c from the browser view, it’s
populated with some default headers, To:, Cc: and so on. To activate
these headers, add set edit_headers = yes to your .muttrc. Mutt also
has some “pseudo-headers” which trigger special behaviour in Mutt
when it reads the file back. One of those is Attach:.

Vifm has the ability to pipe the name of the selected file to
standard output by using vifm --choose-files -. - is what tells vifm
not to send the output to a file, but instead to standard output. I
wrote a small shell script which pipes the output of vifm using the
above command and adds Attach: to the start of the line, and echoes
that whole line. This is the shell script:

    #!/bin/bash

    file="$(vifm --choose-files -)"

    echo "Attach: $file"

Then it’s easy enough to call this shell script (which is stored in
my $PATH) in vim and paste the output to line 7 in the vim email
composer, which is the line directly below the final header. This is
the relevant .vimrc section:

    nnoremap <Leader>A :6r !vifm_attach <CR>

The nice thing about this method is that I can add multiple files by
simply running the command again. There can be multiple lines with
the header Attach: and all of them will be read by Mutt. I can also
leverage all the normal functionality of vifm, like jumping to
directories, regex, sorting etc.

  {IMAGE}


Next, I might try to improve the shell script so that I can select
multiple files in vifm and have each of them appear as their own
Attach: line in vim.