How do I open mail using vim?
You can pipe mail to vim, at least on my test system (RHEL 6.7) it worked.
mail | vim -
the vim -
tells vim to read from standard input
you should see output that say's:
Vim: reading from stdin...
at that point just press the number of the mail item you want to read, IE 1
to read the first message,then press ctrl-d to push it forward.
You can open the mail spool file (usually /var/spool/mail/<username>
) in vim
, but it will contain header information that you probably don't want. Your best bet is to open the message in your mail program, save the message to a file, then open the newly saved file in vim. You'll still have some header information, but much less of it than if you open the mail spool file directly.