Add to Your Remote SpamAssassin Whitelist from Mail.app (with a mutt digression) | Main | disruptions

September 10, 2004

Mutt Codeless Language Module for BBEdit

In the process of messing around with my mutt configuration today, I decided to take a swing at creating a codeless language module for BBEdit 8 that would give me syntax highlighting for my muttrc.

I used John Gruber's Apache module as the template for my muttrc module. I got my list of valid mutt configuration variables from the online mutt manual. Because the site's designer thoughtfully enclosed each variable in <h3> tags, it was pretty trivial to run the manual's source through a regexp that converted the appropriate lines to <string> entries for the module's plist and have a working language module in less than fifteen minutes of grep/sed/cut/paste.

To use it, if you're the other person on the planet who uses mutt and BBEdit and has upgraded to BBEdit 8, download Mutt_Configuration.plist.zip and put the unzipped file in ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Language Modules (which you might need to create). Then restart BBEdit.

The module is written to recognize ".muttrc" as a valid filename, so running, say "bbedit ~/.muttrc" from the terminal will get you a syntax-highlighted .muttrc once you've got the module installed.

Now to get back to deciding whether I prefer Mail.app or mutt.