Apple Mail and MPW
Apple Mail won’t let me use the MPW font for plain-text messages. And that has been driving me nuts since I switched to OS X. Luckily, typing defaults write com.apple.mail NSFixedPitchFont MPW into the Terminal will.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Apple Mail (it’s tough to break the habit of calling it Mail.app, but I’m trying dammit) is a wonderful mail client for my needs. It does everything I want it to do and does it well enough for me. Which is lucky because Thunderbird doesn’t look as nice and I can’t really justify buying Mailsmith.
My previous main mail programs were Eudora (back in its shareware days), Claris Em@iler and, very briefly, Microsoft Outlook Express. I loved Emailer, it was fast and simple. It had a clean interface and live filtering (that thing iTunes does where the results of your search are updated as you type). But it was discontinued as a product long before Claris was folded back into Apple and, as you can imagine, was therefore lacking in support and updates. Eventually I had to retire the trusty workhorse and Outlook Express was the path of least resistance at that point. Luckily I was able to switch to Apple Mail within a year of that. I really clung to Emailer right to the bitter end. If you want to take a look at it (remember, it’s a System 7 era app, so you’ll need Classic installed and a grain of salt), you can apparently download it here.
And, really, can you blame me? I mean, the splash screen art was oddly reminiscent of the artwork on the 25th Anniversary edition The Fountainhead. Which, to my mind is just the icing on an incredibly rich piece of wonderful software.
Back to the point: Apple Mail lets you view plain text messages in a monospace font, which is a wonderful feature, it doesn’t actually let you choose MPW as that font, however. The reasons for this probably have something to do with a bit not being set somewhere in MPW’s ttf file but, frankly, I don’t care why; I just want to use my favourite monospace font for mail.
Luckily, the fix is pretty simple. We just have to alter Mail’s preferences behind its back. So, quit Mail, fire up Terminal and enter ‘defaults write com.apple.mail NSFixedPitchFont MPW‘. Then launch Mail and type a couple of braces into a blank email to check it actually worked. Of course, you have to have the MPW font installed on your system for this to work…
