Ah, that pager - yeah, it does suck. You can redirect messages to a register or file though it is cumbersome. See help :redir. vi does indeed take a long time to get into and find your way around, but I find that once you've gotten into its way of getting things done, you can work with very little distraction. When in doubt, reach for :help - there's copious documentation.

Personally, I think an editor is just an editor - period. Of course, while I read my mail with mutt, I do edit it with vim.

$ grep vim .muttrc
set editor="vim -c 'set textwidth=60 | normal }j'"

Same goes for my Usenet perusal with slrn. It's also the editor midnight commander is set up to use (on the rare occasion I reach for that). And so on. Tools should do one job, not attempt to be everything under the sun. Where the tasks overlap (like needing an editor when dealing with mails), the tools should let the user tell them what other tools they want to use instead of providing their own rendition of it. I'm still peeved that Mozilla provides no way to use vim or another editor for text input areas on webpages - pasting to gvim and back just doesn't cut it.

As always, though, different strokes for different people. I do think that most folks don't give vi a fair enough shot, but if they truly don't like it, far be it from me to force anything onto anyone.

Makeshifts last the longest.