Had you used mutt instead of Gmail, you would have simply used: SHIFT-zSHIFT-z. When you want to compose mail in one of these programs, it opens your specified text editor and uses the whatever text you enter as the contents of your message. It works a lot like the 'Intents' feature which has been Android has received so much praise for, only it's decades old.

Actually, there's no reason for this to depend on the cli. In Firefox, there are plugins which give you a button to click under every text box which open your favorite text editor with a buffer already open containing the contents of the text box. Edit the buffer and save, and your changed appear in the text box. (This is, in fact, how I am editing this comment.) On Unix systems, a graphical mail program could easily use a shell call to get text from an external program. The only problem is, this just doesn't really happen. Vendors prefer proprietary interop with their own products rather than more universal interop methods.

I'm not sure if you're saying that this shows the problem to be solved, or that it shows just how unsolved the problem is...

I like. It appears Google released a command line tool that integrates with its services: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/

There is a Firefox extension that allows you to edit any text field with any text editor. I forget the name, but a quick Google search should reveal something.

Maybe you should give VMail a shot (http://danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html). I haven't tried it yet, but it looks really interesting for someone used to the Vim keyboard bindings.

you've just shown the fail that is GUI. alt tab and copy paste seriously?

command line mail clients dont need any of that. you edit it in vim and send it from vim. or you edit it from your email client THROUGH wim and send it also directly.

No utterly long key combo. No app switching. No delay. No complexity. No cut-and-paste.

That is the actual point.