zabbo

Let’s start with the observation that the Linux kernel community discourages sending patches as attachments (tpp, section 1a). Sending patches as attachments creates pain for the sender, regardless of what you or I might think of this fact.

Thus, it’s a shame that Thunderbird doesn’t have a trivial mechanism to insert a file in to its plain text composing interface without altering the file. There are at least three stumbling blocks: translating tabs into spaces, trimming trailing whitespace, and wrapping lines.

One suggested hack to work around this is to use an external editor extension which lets you fire up, say, vim to insert the file into the editing buffer. This doesn’t work well in OS X, for much the same reasons that it doesn’t work well for eclipse.

After some trial and error I found Quicktext, an extension for inserting signatures, which can be abused to insert files. After installing the extension, one:

1. sets the word wrapping preference to 0 before composing the new message
2. inserts the file as HTML, to preserve trailing whitespace
3. restores the previous word wrapping preference

This is violently imperfect. Inserting as HTML to preserve whitespace runs the risk of escaping HTML which might be in the file. I do this so infrequently that it’ll do for now. I usually send patches with tools. (git-send-email, hg email, sendpatchset).

I was reasonably excited to find that it seems like someone who understands Mozilla extensions could build an extension to insert text without altering the input. nsIPlaintextEditor seems to have knobs to disable translation of whitespace and word wrapping. I might try my hand at this some day but would be even happier if someone beat me to it.