I just migrated from Windows XP to Mac OSX 10.6, where I use mutt 1.5.21 with
Firefox 4.0.1.
Under Windows XP, I developed a style of working in which email threads, saved
as MBOX files with descriptive names (e.g., with time stamps) would
automatically get put into my to-do list and presented to me in Firefox. (The
program I wrote to do this is an open-source Python project if anyone is
interested; an earlier version is described in lifehacker.com.)
By clicking on the filename of the MBOX file in Firefox, I could launch mutt
and read the thread, respond, etc. Under Mac OSX, however, I been unable to
get this to work in Firefox despite many hours of reading forums and support
pages and exploring various leads.
In Firefox, I want to be able to click on a link in an HTML file such as:
TODO <A HREF=file:///Users/me/request.mbox>request.mbox</A>
to execute something like the following:
MBOX=$(echo $1 | sed 's=file://==') # to turn "file:///Users" into
"/Users"
mutt -f $MBOX # to execute: mutt -f
/Users/me/request.mbox
I understand from the Firefox developers that the filename (with "file:///...")
is passed to an external program as an argument. I can configure Firefox to
handle MBOX files with, for example, MacVim, which opens the file in an
editor. The difference is that MacVim is a clickable Mac application, while
mutt is a Unix command that needs to run in a terminal.
I have tried the following:
1) Using Automator to a shell script, as above, into a clickable application
(trying out of five or six variants thereof).
2) Using Platypus to create a clickable application, similarly to Automator.
3) Finding a Mac terminal that can be called with an argument specifying a
shell script
to be executed -- but the main alternatives, Terminal and Iterm2, seem not
to be
callable with any sorts of arguments.
4) Configuring ViewSourceWith to call mutt.
5) Configuring Firefox to call its native Mail program when clicking on a file
with extension .mbox. This works, in a way: it calls Mail with a blank
message
to be written, with the MBOX file as an attachment. Even if this did work,
I'd
much rather use mutt than Mac Mail... (I also tried Thunderbird.)
Can anyone suggest a different strategy for solving this? I'm strongly
motivated to solve this problem because the ability to click on MBOX files in
my browser is very important for my productivity.
I'm not sure this actually a mutt problem -- maybe it's an issue with how Mac
OSX handles the associations between programs and file extensions -- but I
thought I'd post here in case others have tried the same thing...
Tom
--
Tom Baker <tba...@tbaker.de>
