Template engines and External Editor Revived

[Frederick888]

With ExtEditorR and a few lines of Bash code, you can easily post-process your email with a template engine.

(Why? Why not!)

In this example we'll use Mustache and sed to insert a signature with date and time.

Save the below two files in the same directory and chmod +x the Bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"

kitty --start-as=normal -- nvim "$1"
mustache - "$1" <"$DIR/data.yml" | sponge "$1"
sed "s/(date)/$(date --utc)/" -i "$1"

signature: |
  Best Regards,
  John Smith

  (date)

Configure your Thunderbird email account and use {{signature}} as signature text (and uncheck Use HTML as usual).

Then update ExtEditorR settings:

Next time you use ExtEditorR, after exiting Kitty/Neovim, you'll see {{signature}} got replaced by

Best Regards,
John Smith

Sun 10 Jul 2022 10:23:44 UTC