I’m considering using Alpine on OS X (Yosemite). I have most things configured, but I want to be able to use a GUI text editor (specifically OS X’s TextEdit) as the Alpine alternative editor, so that I can use the system keyboard shortcuts, spelling checker, mouse, etc. (I’m aware that I could use an editor like emacs or vim, but I don’t want to use those.)
I know about the configuration setting in Alpine (Setup > Config > … scroll down a lot … Editor), which wants the name of a program/command to run when I invoke the alternate editor. I’ve tried “open -e”, which tells TextEdit to open whatever filename follows, and invoking the alternate editor does indeed open TextEdit. However, the problem is returning the contents of the TextEdit buffer to Alpine — this doesn’t work. I’m not sure what mechanism Alpine uses to obtain the text from the alternative editor, though I assume it uses a temporary file. In any case, I think the problem is that the “open” command returns immediately and Alpine thinks I didn’t type anything. (I have also tried the “bbedit” command to invoke “BBEdit”, with essentially the same result.)
Thanks in advance.
