A bash script to copy the contents of the active editing area of an application into an external editor and back. For example, use it to edit Thunderbird email messages in your favorite editor.
- X server must be running.
- xclip and xdotool need to be installed.
- This script must be run via keyboard shortcut while the window, the contents of which you want to edit, is active (has focus). That is, you need to configure a keyboard shortcut in your window manager.
Set the following variables in a file called externaleditor.conf in the same directory as this script! (You can also define them as environmental variables, e.g. in ~/.profile.) You can copy from the following examples and uncomment (remove the "#" at the beginning of the line.
Variable "externaleditor": The external editor you want to use. Examples:
externaleditor="emacsclient" # This assumes that Emacs is running as a server (see Emacs' function "server-start"). In Emacs, press C-x # when finished editing.
externaleditor="gvim -f" # if you want to use gvim
externaleditor="gnome-terminal -- vim" # if you want to use vim inside a gnome-terminal
externaleditor="emacs" # if you want to open a new Emacs instance
Variable "emailclientwindowtitle": A character string which is part of the window title of your email client. If this string is found in the window title, the file that is send to the external editor gets the extension ".eml" (otherwise ".txt"). (This may or may not be important to you.) If the variable is not set, "Thunderbird" is used. Example:
emailclientwindowtitle="Thunderbird"
Variable "tbformat": Set this to "html" if you compose HTML messages in Thunderbird in order to preserve line breaks. However, be aware that HTML formatting is lost when using this script! Unfortunately, this script is not able to detect the format used in thunderbird, so there is no good solution for being able to compose both text and HTML messages without changing this configuration. (You could use two instances of this script with two different keyboad shortcuts to invoke them though.) If the variable is not set, "txt" is used. Example:
tbformat="txt"
This script is rather simple and stupid, using "select all", "copy", and "paste" by "pressing" keyboard shortcuts programmatically. This is not immune to errors. For example, if you send the body of an email message to the external editor and put the cursor into the "To" field of the email client before finishing the edit, the script can not find the message body and should surely not paste the edited text into the "To" field. As a small measure against such problems, this scripts inserts a check string into the application window which is active when the script is run, and later checks if it can still find this check string. If it does not, or the original window does not exist anymore, a short and informative popup message is displayed.
Only pure text is copied and pasted, i.e. formatting is lost. Therefore, it might not be a good idea to use this script for formatted Text (like e.g. HTML).
I started writing this script because the External Editor plugin for thunderbird no longer worked with newer versions of thunderbird.
Thanks to @ebardie for several improvements!
Thanks to @dbeniamine for suggesting to separate the configuration from the script!
Copyright (c) 2020-2021 Sven Hartenstein
The script is released under the MIT License.
If you have suggestions on how to improve this script, please file an issue or make a pull request.