mutt, signify and emacsclient

In line with the unix-philosophy, I have a chain of tools rather than one big program to manage email. Today I found out what caused that chain to break when I was logged in text-only.

I use signify to automatically pick a random signature from a predefined set of signatures. signify is started automatically in .xsession when I log in via X. When I login text-only .xsession is never run, and hence signify is never started. This made mutt hang (actually mutt didn't hang, it just waited for signify to fill the pipe with a signature) before it handled over the message to be edited in emacsclient. I thought for a long time that this was somehow a problem with mutt and the $EDITOR variable within a screen terminal, but that was wrong.

So, to conclude:

• if you use signify in --fifo mode, don't forget to start it.
• make sure that your environment is functionally-identical when you make a text-only login (e.g. move startup-logic from .xsession to .screenrc or .bash_profile (or even .bashrc))

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Last modified: oktober 15, 2019