I’ll explain (I think I’d better ).

Mac OS is pretty complete out of the box. If you’d like to burn an ISO image onto CD, or browse that ISO image, or ssh to another host, or use VNC, or… then it’s all already there, well integrated and working from the start.

Windows isn’t like that — the basic OS lacks a lot of functionality. If you’re going to burn an ISO, or browse one then you’ll need something like Nero. If you’d like to ssh to another machine then you download putty, if you’re going to connect to another machine using VNC then you’ll need that, and so on.

What you end up with is a whole host of extra software, all pretty much working, but all pulling in slightly different directions and all clearly written by different companies with different ideas about the user interface, and differing levels of integration with the whole.

Firefox and friends are also a little like that. The basic functionality is in the application, but all the extra frills are plugins, written by many different people. Many of the plugins are a little quirky, and they all tend to pull in slightly different directions — sometimes interacting badly with each other. It works, but it’s not elegant.

Microsoft and the Open Source Community do this for very different reasons. Microsoft does it to spread their programming effort as thinly as possible (I guess they’d say as efficiently as possible), always concentrating on ‘value’, and never on quality. The Open Source Community do it out of necessity: not everyone can be hacking the central code all the time, it’s just not practical, and the plugin approach enables a huge number of people to work on additional functionality whilst keeping the project manageable.

The world would be a much poorer place without open source software, but there is a price to pay. The plugin approach that open source development engenders leads to some great software (I wouldn’t give up my Squeezeboxes for the world for example, and my squeezeserver is bristling with plugins), but those systems do sometimes feel like they’re all elbows and knees — rather awkward, and somewhat less than elegant.

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There’s a plugin for Thunderbird which allows you to do this, but setting it up can be tricky, so I thought I’d document it here.

Install vi

First — assuming you’re a vi user — you need to download MacVim (one of several vis for the Mac, but one I know looks the part and works well), and install it.

Add a small script

Next, you need a small shell script to start up MacVim from Thunderbird (you can’t just point the Thunderbird plugin at MacVim.app — it doesn’t work like that).

Start up a Terminal window (cmd+space terminal <return>), and create the script:

cd /Applications
vi dovim

and here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh
exec open -W -a macvim "$@"

The -W ensures that open waits for MacVim to finish, as otherwise Thunderbird tries to read the file left behind by MacVim before MacVim has finished — which is not good

Now ensure that the script is executable

chmod +x dovim

Install the external editor plugin for Thunderbird

Next, download and install the external editor plugin for Thunderbird from here.

Note:  If you’re using Safari then you may hit a problem at this point. The download is supposed to be a single .xpi file and indeed, that’s what’s offered by the download link. Unfortunately Safari notices that’s it’s really a zip file, and so renames it to <file>.xpi.zip You need to rename the file back — strip the .zip off the end of the file name.

Apart from the above caveat, install the plugin in the usual way, then configure it — not to use MacVim itself, but to use the dovim script you placed in /Applications and you’re almost there.

Finally, tweak MacVim’s settings

Start up MacVim and change its settings so that the application quits when the last window quits, as otherwise Thunderbird won’t wake up until you close the MacVim application completely:

and that should be it, you can now drop into vi from within Thunderbird‘s email editor.

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