Outlook Web Page Mail Solution (Based on Sublime Text)

Recently I really suffered from my lagging Outlook App (Windows7) , on which so slowing response for all kinds of operations. Sometimes I even need to wait for mins for some refreshed mail box. And also it seems not caused by just ‘old laptop’ or just Hardware related topics, since my laptop (HP1040 G3?) is not so ‘old’ one, while other programs still running smoothly there.

I can’t endure such situation longer.

But lucky , Microsoft did good job in their ‘web’ side, I start to like their Office365 serivices. So anyway I can fully leverage the webpage (and browser) in my daily office life to make it a bit interesting?

After days digging, I got the way , though of course it’s not perfect, and, in some special case, I would still open Windows Outlook to do some action.

Shortly, the solution is Chrome (Office Web Page) + Sublime Text3 + Ghosttext

Nothing special in Chrome part, just use it to open your Outlook page, while also Ghoasttext Extension is also matured enough to trigger Sublime for textarea.

So I listed tools/ conditions/ brief introduction below:

Chrome
- Extension , Ghosttext needed , which is used to invoke Sublime Text3 (need to be installed in your laptop/PC/Mac/etc. before hand, of course);
Sublime Text 3 ( For Sublime’s user guide, that’s another big story, need effort to learn/try/dig….)
- Ghosttext package to be installed to be locked with Chrome (this one is mandatory, while all others are optional , up to user’s idea how to use Sublime)
- HTML5 Snippets to enable HTML quick edit
- HTML-CSS-Js prettify Also famous one to prettify the code
- SnippetBetterManager to help quick add/edit snippets
- Six to enable Vim-like editor, which is best one from my Pov after tried several others package
Sublime Configuration
- Key binding
  - I would like to suggest bind some shortcut with below steps in Macros (after mail content loaded into Sublime text)
    - Set Syntax: HTML (because the Ghostext will not use .html for loaded content)
    - Insert your default mail template via your customized snippets, and please remember, in Email, you can’t use <style> defined block CSS, but need to make those Css code inline in HTML tags, which means you either
      - hard-code your css in your default mail template for some key mail elements;
      - Prepare some pre-hard-code element in your snippets (e.g. p, blockquote, bullet and etc, in my own case), or even bind some key for high frequent tags , like me, I bind ctrl+p with ‘create new p tag in new line with my own style info inline there.’
      - Or, if you really have better skills in Sublime, my ideal expectation is to have one ‘Build system’ for html to enable one ‘Css-inliner’ can combine and override your current mail page with CSS inline replacement, but , sorry, my poor undersanding in Sublime blocks me there.

So, after above action, my action is more interesting while using Chrome to check my mail, and especially I can make may ‘fancy’ style for mail which can’t be seen in my colleagues mails ;)

As one bonus track, if you are replying some ‘quick info’ without complicated style, you can take another good extension (chrome) to do that, i.e. ‘Wasavi’ , which will create one new ‘Vim-like’ editor after you hit short cut key.