emacsmirror / gmail-message-mode

A major-mode for editing gmail messages using markdown syntax

gmail-message-mode

gmail-message-mode is an emacs major-mode for editing Gmail messages using markdown syntax, it is meant for use with browser plugins which allow you to edit text fields with external applications (in this case, emacs). See Plugins below for a list for each browser.

The problem: Lately, Gmail messages have been demanding html. That made it very hard to edit them outside your browser, because you had to edit html source code (for instance, linebreaks were ignored and you had to type <br> instead).

gmail-message-mode to the rescue: Simply activate this mode in Gmail messages (See Activation); the buffer is converted to markdown and you may edit at will, but the file is still saved as html behind the scenes so Gmail won't know a thing! See ham-mode to understand how this works.

The point is that you can write Gmail messages as plain text, and they will show up fine when you go back to Gmail. And if you want more than plain text, you can write in Markdown syntax, which provides you with an easy way to add bullet-points, lists, bold, italics, etc, (which is, in fact, faster than mousing through Gmail's web interface).

How does this compare to Gnus (or other emacs mail clients)?

gmail-message-mode is not a mail client, it's actually a very different approach. This package:

1. Allows you to use Emacs' full editing prowess, without having to give up Gmail's web interface. So it's a nicer option if you like Gmail as a whole, but wish you could use Emacs for writing the messages;
2. It's almost trivial to setup;
3. It allows you to generate complex html structures using simple Markdown syntax.

Activation

Make sure you install it:

M-x package-install RET gmail-message-mode

And that's it!
(if you install manually, note that it depends on ham-mode)

This package will (using auto-mode-alist) configure emacs to activate gmail-message-mode whenever you're editing a file that seems to be a Gmail message (if you don't want this, see Disabling below). However, given the wide range of possible plugins, it's hard to catch them all. You may have to add entries manually to auto-mode-alist, to make sure gmail-message-mode is activated.

Plugins

2. Google-Chrome or Chromium - Edit with emacs
3. Conkeror - Spawn Helper (built-in)
4. Firefox - Used to work with It's all text. See this thread for a hacky workaround.
5. Others - Tried it in another browser? let me know!

Disabling

To keep gmail-message-mode from automatically adding itself to your auto-mode-alist, just add the following snippet before the package is loaded:

(setq gmm/auto-mode-list nil)