Hi Dave,

Well, I've just started :) and probably wouldn't use it for quick replies. But my motivations for using Edit in TextMate were:

* Snippets make it easy to boilerplate responses. I know there are Mail plugins to help with this, but I haven't seen any with TextMate's Regex capabilities. I used to use TextExpander but the current version conflicts with my Dvorak keyboard.

* When I write a long email I often like to save a text file version for future reference.

* I work in digital preservation and know that all those Microsoft Word documents will eventually become unreadable. Using TextMate as my text editor, blogging platform, and now email editor lets me keep non- proprietary versions of all my documents. (I save most everything as HTML.)

Of course, there are wrinkles I haven't smoothed out yet. For instance, when I select part of a quoted message in Mail.app and Edit in TextMate, the overall quote level seems to increase for some reason when I return to Mail. But so far, so good.

jon /RNN (http://responsenotnecessary.com)

From: "David Frascone" dave@frascone.com

Do you actually find it easier to compose mail in textmate? For me, I've replaced all of my programmers' editors with textmate -- and I've even gone so far as to set my EDITOR variable.

But e-mail? Is it worth the effort?

-Dave